There be dragons aplenty, angels, demons and ghastly creatures both fleshy and feathered in the Globe Theatre’s inaugural production of Doctor Faustus.

Christopher Marlowe’s take on the familiar Faust legend, bold in its religious content, was a controversial hit of its day, but the play’s almost medieval apposition of high thinking and knockabout farce by no means guarantees it success in the contemporary theatre. If Matthew Dunster and his team of actors fail with any of their audience it won’t be for want of trying. Throwing themselves at the material with characteristic Globe energy, theirs is a Faustus of pageantry and spectacle.

The Seven Deadly Sins, vivid in red and black, emerge through at trapdoor at the crack of thuggish Beelzebub’s whip. Acrobatic Covetousness (the aptly named Michael Camp) wheels and darts around, while Jade William’s arch Sloth reclines on her cushions. The broad comedy of Gluttony (Jonathan Cullen) with his requisite fart gags, while entirely in keeping with the spirit of the play, does however pall somewhat. The Papal banquet, however, with its visual humour, comes off neatly thanks to Dunster’s swift pacing and the deftness of the staging.

Yet try though the production may, among the pageantry and comedy there was something lacking — the psychological truth and complexity that refuses to be so smoothly unknotted. Dunster’s previous Globe outing with Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida made psychological sense of an arguably even more challenging play, so it is odd to find it lacking here. Perhaps it is the attempt to make Faustus — dense of reference and unfashionable of subject-matter — fit into the family-friendly environs of the Globe that compromises the intensity of the central partnership of Mephistopheles and Faustus.

Smooth and urbane, Arthur Darvill’s devil never quite convinces us of his depths. An angel who fell along with Lucifer, confronted with the face of God and then exiled perpetually, his is not a straightforward evil. Yet here we see little of this tension, and his relaxed, chummy encounters with Paul Hilton’s Faustus allows us too easily to forget the conclusion to which their jolliest of japes must tend.

Hilton likewise, though charismatic and eminently watchable, doesn’t really seem willing to commit to the contradictions of a scholar who understands that “the reward of sin is death”, yet pursues the path of sin regardless.

A dynamic effort, this Doctor Faustus makes its own deal with the devil when it conjures an appealing, entertaining play from a recalcitrant text. If in the process it sacrifices some of its dark complexity, then perhaps that isn’t such a poor bargain given the context and the demands of Globe audiences.

n Until October 2. Box office www.shakespearesglobe.com or 020 7401 9919.