The one truly dramatic characterisation here was that of Peter Rose as Mephistophélès, suitably diabolic in tone and demeanour, while Sarah Connolly's Marguerite was warmly impassioned.
The fires were set in the most diabolic of locations, cutting off escape routes and filling stairwells and hallways with flames and blinding black smoke.
There is something diabolic in the sooty image; it takes a moment to notice the tiny, fleshlike, pointed polyurethane heels at the end of her tensed feet, which give Mège an otherworldly, succubus-like aspect.
Seven months after the convictions, in May 1950, Hoover gave a radio address in which he declared "communists have been and are today at work within the very gates of America.... Wherever they may be, they have in common one diabolic ambition: to weaken and to eventually destroy American democracy by stealth and cunning".
It's not that the music is particularly distinguished, but there's something utterly original in the way the playfully diabolic lyrics bask in the sunshiny Broadway sound (lushly drawn out by the orchestra under Stephen Oremus' music direction).
"It is because their murder symbolizes the start of a diabolic era in world history.
The ornate Hindu cave-temples at Ellora were "the most wonderful thing" he had seen in India, though "too diabolic to be beautiful".
"I am the Cheshire cat that welcomes Alice in Wonderland with its diabolic smile, and chatters away as she wanders around the Château," offers Mr Murakami on the palace's website.
Now Gísli Örn Gardarsson, the Icelandic gymnast who commandeered the stage with his elasticity and upside-down walking in Metamorphosis, has produced a response to Goethe's play which buries its story, and its human implications, in a welter of diabolic high jinks.
Diabolic Force started in 2001 after a Farscape gig.
