Was 16th-century Spain the US of its day, keen to expand its empire, creating a climate of fear as it battled the Muslim Moors and seeing threats to its security everywhere? Playwright Torben Betts plays with history in a painfully facetious satire that clearly yearns to have contemporary relevance but which comes across like a particularly unfunny and tiresomely extended episode of Blackadder.
The real madness here is that so many talented people - including a fine cast - have indulged Betts, rather than reined in his excesses.
Excess is very much apparent at the court of Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon, where Jews are casually consigned to the flames as preparations are being made for the marriage of their daughter Juana to Philip, the son of Maximilian of Austria. Brought up in a suffocating atmosphere of piety and barbarity, Juana, perhaps not surprisingly, is a little loopy. Indeed, this might be the only sane response. She is, after all, merely an item of trade, just as her long-suffering slaves, Ludo and his sister Angelina, are mere chattels not human beings.
But Ludo and Angelina - clearly exceptionally well-versed in Jacobean revenge tragedy - are plotting their own vengeance on the state that murdered their mother and sold them into slavery.
There are odd flashes of the play that this might have been: there is one fantastic scene - a game of strip poker played with books rather than cards - in which the shift of power is delicately delineated. It has real dramatic tension, something almost completely lacking from the rest of a script that puts cleverness above entertainment.
Pip Donaghy as a jack-booted, whip-happy Ferdinand and Siobhan Redmond as his scheming queen lead a first-rate troupe, but I'd opt for three hours of thumbscrews rather than sit through this again.
· Until March 27. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
