Theatre Babel are to classical theatre what minimalism consultants are to the modern home - they strip away all the maddening, deadening stuff, leaving something reinvigorated and new. Recent productions have included Liz Lochhead's Medea and Iain Heggie's savage The King of Scotland; now they turn their intensely modern gaze to John Ford's early-17th-century tale of incestuous love and murder.
The play's weak and sometimes baffling subplots have been stripped away, along with several peripheral characters whose loss nobody will mourn, leaving less than two hours of an essentially private tragedy unfolding behind closed doors. The set is equally stark and bold: just two chairs before a vast projection screen, lit in serene blue and then bloody red, featuring only a cross or dagger. Quee MacArthur's score pumps life into the proceedings, with thumping heartbeats, galloping rhythms and divisions between scenes marked by an electrical fizz. It's hard to imagine a more atmospheric interpretation of the play, or a better-looking staging, for all its simplicity.
Less successful is Babel's treatment of the text itself: a move away from the star-crossed lovers approach to Giovanni and Annabella's incest (Ford reworked Romeo and Juliet to include this religious and social taboo) towards an exploration of the psychology within that relationship. What this means is a recasting of Giovanni as a power-crazed madman, a sexual obsessive bent on holding power over his sister. Compared in the programme to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and cult leader David Koresh, he is transformed into a calculating, monstrous presence, Annabella into his mesmerised prey.
If this were a better-known play, or incest was something we now had ways of dealing with and talking about, maybe such a new emphasis would feel timely. Instead, the tragedy of the drama gets lost (the audience often reacts with laughter), despite an engaging performance by Frances Thorburn as Annabella, and the issue becomes one of manipulation within relationships. That's a rich source of dramatic interest, but the incest is rendered secondary to Giovanni's dangerous personality; he just happens to be his lover's brother. We avoid the questions Ford was asking about forbidden desire in 1630; questions to which we still have no real answers.
Ends Saturday. Box office: 0141-429 0022. Then tours. Details: 0141-226 8806.
