Christopher Marlowe's last play, an account of the 1572 St Bartholomew's Day massacre and its aftermath, is a "bad" text, reputedly assembled partly through the disputed recollection of actors, and is seldom staged. Enter the modern adaptor, with colloquialisms, quotations from other texts, and references to PlayStation, eager to transform this story of religious hatred and political ambition into a parable for our times. Young Irish playwright Alex Johnston has pulled it off well on the page, but the power of this Bedrock theatre company production is diluted by its staging in an auditorium that is too large, dissipating the actors' energy.
Johnston laces the action with a gaming metaphor: while the ambitious, murderous Duke of Guise (the powerful Karl Shiels) thinks he "hast all the cards", the wise Huguenot leader Navarre, recently married into the Catholic royal family, says Guise "thinks himself a King, but he's the Joker". Guise's attempt to control through terror eventually undermines him, as he is unable to control the greed and ambition that his rash actions unleash.
The contemporary relevance of the story is brought home through the use of a media "frame": we follow the story of political succession through the accounts of television reporter Gillian Rumour, who narrates the action, trailed by her cameraman.
It is a shame that the boldness of Johnston's interventions are not met powerfully enough by Jimmy Fay's staging. The crucial early scene setting up Navarre's role is played out of half the audience's line of vision. There is the feeling that the fine cast need to invest more energy - sometimes even audibility is a problem. This gives a troubling feeling of insouciance to the project: did Bedrock really intend to seem bored by mass slaughter?
Things only start to rip and roar in the final 15 minutes, with Andrea Irvine's spectacular self-immolation as Catherine de Medici, a series of speeches in which Navarre channels John of Gaunt to whip his new subjects into a nationalist frenzy, and Rumour's attempt at an exposé of Navarre's ambitions - which makes her the last body on the heap.
Until September 21. Box office: 00 353 1 881 9613.
