Jude is a Law unto himself

Jude Law has come home. He's also grown a beard. 'I don't think Doctor Faustus found much time to shave,' laughs the actor, who is returning to his first love - the theatre - in a Young Vic production of Christopher Marlowe's rarely seen tragedy.

'At the moment,' he says of his facial outcrop, 'it's lending itself quite comfortably to the part, so I'll keep it.' Jude Law smiles again: he looks happy to be back.

When last seen on the London stage in the autumn of 1999, Law hadn't yet been anointed as the young megastar, Great British Hope, and whatever other accolades his Oscar-nominated performance as Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley prompted from the world's press. Since then, he's acted on screen for Steven Spielberg (in A.I.), playing Gigolo Joe (for which he was an unexpected Golden Globe nominee last month) and Sam Mendes (in The Road To Perdition with Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, due for release in America in July), and found himself covered in muck and bullets alongside Joseph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz in Enemy At The Gates. But for some time now, the siren song of the theatre has been calling Law back to the stage, where he hasn't performed since that Young Vic production of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore - directed, as Faustus is, by the venue's artistic director David Lan - more than two years ago.

So here Law is during a break in rehearsals, eating Caesar salad and chips and discussing the role for which he is earning the same fee - £285 a week - as the rest of Lan's seven-person cast. That's quite a contrast from Law's ever-spiralling Hollywood fee. But so is an acting challenge that, the actor says, quite simply stands apart.

'It all comes full circle; it's just been a dream,' says Law, a Hither Green boy whose South-East London childhood included attending a school, Alleyn's in Dulwich, named after the very first Faustus in 1590, Edward Alleyn. 'I'd read the play when I was at school and just really loved the piece and was amazed I never got to see a production of it in that time.' It was toward the end of the run of 'Tis Pity that Law broached the play to Lan for a possible reunion. 'I just saw a really exciting journey for an actor and exciting themes - rebelling against the institution, embracing the darker side of humankind, the balance that in life without bad there's no good. These are huge questions.'

In Marlowe's play, the Wittenberg scholar John Faustus sells his soul to the devil in return for a life of mirth, only to end up regretting a bargain that finds him consigned to damnation and hell. Steeped in notions of vaulting over-ambition and repentance, the play might seem to promise a heavy-going slog when, in fact, it can be unbelievably visceral and pacy, as Law hopes it will be. (Expect an evening running less than two hours, no interval.) 'We're relaying an extraordinary journey in a way that will remind people of their own lives, of the world we live in,' says Law. 'Whether they be junkies or heads of Enron.'

While many actors choose theatrical roles - Ralph Fiennes comes to mind (Hamlet, Richard II) - that inevitably invite comparisons, Law was pleased that, as with his incestuous Giovanni in 'Tis Pity, Faustus hadn't been overly performed. (Past Faustuses include Ian McKellen and Ben Kingsley, both more than 20 years ago.) 'The roles in Shakespeare are so well-documented and so well-regarded,' says Law, 'that I sometimes wonder whether we overlook his contemporaries and his predecessors. Giovanni's journey is as fatal as Macbeth's, as lovesick as Romeo's. It's the same for Faustus, in a way; this role is a combination of them all - as great if not greater at times.'

But surely Law's power brokers across the Atlantic want their client to stick to the big-money world of film? Not at all. 'Those who know me well,' insists the actor, 'know that this is what I have always been about, and what I will continue to be about - there's no pressure. This is as much a part of my career as anything else.' After all, it was seven years ago - when Law, now 29, was in his career infancy - that he was jetting off from the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was performing Euripides's Ion in rep in Lan's translation (how the two first met), to rehearse his Broadway debut opposite Kathleen Turner and Sex And The City's Cynthia Nixon in Indiscretions. Law briefly appeared naked during the play, but, even better, the New York critics said he could act - a Tony nomination followed, and the actor was on his way.

Perhaps that's why Lan, his director, speaks of Law as a kind of incipient Laurence Olivier, while quick to offer the qualifying remark that Jude is not yet an actor of Olivier's stature. 'At the same time,' says Lan, 'what's odd about Jude is that just as Olivier's generation had little difficulty crossing between Hollywood and the Old Vic - they were classical actors who were movie stars - so, too, is there something of that in Jude. What's more,' Lan says of his leading man, 'Jude's very, very bright.'

In any case, it's hardly as if Law is turning his back on the screen, even if the involvement of his production company, Natural Nylon, in Faustus ensures an ongoing synergy between film and stage. (The theatre division of Natural Nylon next turns to a West End Three Sisters, due in September, for which Ewan McGregor has been floated as a possible star.) In June, Law joins Penelope Cruz in the new David Mamet film, Diary Of A London Physician, followed by two Nylon-backed ventures - Psychoville, co-starring his wife Sadie Frost, and World Of Tomorrow, alongside his Ripley co-star and friend Gwyneth Paltrow.