One character in John Webster's Jacobean drama is described as "perverse and turbulent", but that's also a fair description of the whole work.
In this bold regional revival, co-directors Gregory Floy and Sue Lefton pilot a clear course through the intricacies of Webster's plot, allowing the horror and the heroism that are its twin themes to shine through. If anything, this lucid, minimally-designed staging is too cool: not murky enough for its own good.
The play celebrates the grace that emanates from the eponymous Duchess as she builds a secret family with her servant, then suffers the excessively cruel and unusual punishment meted out by her brothers.
Here, Kate Gartside is a very poised Duchess: warm when wooing and steely when psychologically tormented, but never prey to emotional extremes. She also has to share the limelight with Peter Forbes, who transforms the self-loathing assassin Bosola from a sardonic thug into something far more complex and central.
Forbes's detailed performance shows how Bosola is crushed by his dependence on the brothers' patronage, just as the Duchess is destroyed by their aristocratic spite.
Other performances are less happy. Ignatius Antony looks suitably malevolent as the Duchess's twin brother, Ferdinand, but scales the heights of petulance rather than rage. Tony Casement's Antonio is a bit dull, making you wonder what the spirited Duchess ever saw in him. By and large, though, the cast are able and well-spoken.
The only serious faults in Floy's and Lefton's pacy production is their tendency to understate the macabre side of Webster's drama - the Duchess expires, quickly and unhistrionically, with a dainty sigh - and their occasional, comical determination to interpret metaphors literally.
Tim Meacock's bare set may be the product of necessity rather than design. But this makes it all the more effective when, in a rare moment of true horror, the dummy corpses of the Duchess's murdered lover and children rise up through the floor in a glass case, like an extreme Damien Hirst exhibit.
Until 15 April. Box office: 01206 573948.
The Duchess of Malfi
