What if Hamlet had had a narky sister? Likely she would have told the dithering Dane, as Theresa tells her brother Michael in this 1940s-set revenge thriller: "It's been no kind of life waiting for you to get your act together." Stephen Sharkey's doom-laden play throws together Shakespeare and Catholicism to explore the aftermath of the murder of Frank Donohue by his wife and her lover. In wartime, it asks, what price one more death? And "all them sins", as a parishioner inquires of his priest, "they all get forgiven, do they?"
The play is infused with a Greek-tragic atmosphere by Turkish director Serdar Bilis, emphasised by choreographer Steven Hoggett, who makes one fluid, nightmarish intervention. The action unfolds on a single, scorched-earth set, suggestive of blackened souls and of the bombed-out graveyard where Frank sleeps his unquiet sleep. Sharkey's language is meant to be ritualistic, but it sometimes sounds portentous, and while his interweaving of Christian and classical symbols gives the play a mythic resonance, the grand guignol conclusion to which it tends is as overblown as it is revealing.
But Sharkey's is a provocative exploration of morality at a time of war; of how brutality so desensitises that even the Virgin Mary might run out of pity. And, despite one German accent straight out of 'Allo 'Allo, he is well served by a committed cast. This is a potent home front tragedy in which the bombs falling on Liverpool hurt less than the blitz of the soul.
· Until May 26. Box office : 0151-709 4776.
