Spanish Golden Age plays are rather like Hollywood westerns: much of the pleasure lies in their rearrangement of stock ingredients. And the fascination of Peribanez, beautifully directed by Rufus Norris, lies in seeing how the standard themes of honour, jealousy and class are invested with Lope de Vega's own brand of psychological subtlety.
Erotic obsession spins the plot. The trouble starts during the wedding of the peasant Peribanez and Casilda, when the unhorsed local Commander is forced to recover in the former's house and is smitten with the beautiful bride. The Commander's ungovernable passion leads him to spy on Casilda, fruitlessly besiege her and eventually send her husband into battle against the Arab enemy. What you see is a duel to the death between peasant honour and aristocratic corruption.
"The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?" asks Angelo in Measure for Measure, and part of the greatness of Lope's play, written shortly after Shakespeare's, lies in how it shows the technically blameless Casilda driving the Commander mad and her husband to paroxysms of jealousy. But Lope reserves his greatest irony for his subversive treatment of class. The Commander knights Peribanez before sending him into battle partly to dignify his own lechery, but Peribanez turns this against him by asking him to protect his wife during his absence. Honour, in Lope's world, becomes a two-edged sword in which those with the ability to confer it are the ones least likely to possess it.
Although I initially questioned Norris's decision to transfer the action from the 17th to the 20th century, it pays off partly through the eclectic use of Scottish, Irish and Welsh voices and partly through the production's physical inventiveness. The animal imagery running through Tanya Ronder's vibrant translation is embodied on stage with actors playing bulls, mules and horses: in one brilliant stroke David Harewood, who lends the Commander a memorable, champing- at-the-bit frustration, doubles as Peribanez's muzzled mount.
The Blood Wedding-style sense of community is enhanced by having the actors play Orlando Gough's pervasive music. And there are strong individual performances from Michael Nardone as Peribanez, Jackie Morrison as Casilda and Mark Lockyer as a stiff-backed Lieutenant. Ian MacNeil's two-tiered set copes deftly with the play's shifting locales and, at the end of an enthralling evening, one wonders why our experience of classic Spanish drama remains so sporadic.
· Until June 7. Box office: 020-7928 6363 .
