Do students give a toss about professional theatre? I ask because here we have Schiller's great tragedy well performed in a campus-based theatre. You'd have thought students of drama or modern languages would be beating down the doors, yet I counted barely half a dozen young people among the decidedly mature audience.
A pity, because Patrick Sandford's modern-dress production, using Jeremy Sams's translation, makes the play easily accessible. What Sandford brings out clearly is Schiller's divided attitude towards his warring queens. Emotionally, he is drawn to Mary, a martyred heroine falsely accused of plotting her cousin's death and meeting her own end with grace and dignity. Intellectually, however, Schiller is much more intrigued by Elizabeth, a solitary figure with a Shakespearean awareness of the hollowness of power, and craving Mary's death while seeking to absolve herself of moral responsibility.
Unsurprisingly, it is Jessica Turner's Elizabeth that dominates this production. Looking astonishingly like a younger Maggie Smith in her titian wig, she even invests the role with something of that arch-comedienne's sardonic wit. When she tells Talbot "this is the privy council, not a house of pleasure", you feel she relishes the withering put-down. But in the final scenes the icily regal Turner turns into a Tudor Machiavel as she seeks to distance herself from the death warrant she has signed: this is acting on the grand scale.
Monica Dolan, in contrast, seems oddly cast as Mary. She is an excellent actress who gives us all of Mary's defiant pride. What I missed was the character's charismatic sensuality that has men grovelling at her feet, although Dolan is not helped by being clad in a sexconcealing, dun-coloured raincoat. But, realising this is primarily a play about politics, Sandford has cast the attendant roles from strength. Jonathan Newth's Burleigh is an imperious fixer with lethal trouser creases, Adrian Schiller a suavely two-timing Leicester and David Lyon a wonderfully humane Talbot. Schiller's great play even acquires a fortuitous topicality when we hear the French ambassador denouncing England as a nation "where international law is held in contempt". I suspect even the missing students might have enjoyed that.
· Until May 15. Box office: 023 8067 1771.
