Staging a Jacobean tragedy in the Christopher Wren crypt of St Andrew's Church, Holborn, is a shrewd idea: the mouldering venue reeks of mortality. Not only that but Katie McAleese's adventurous production leads the peripatetic audience from vault to vault, so we seem to be viewing a series of nightmarish chambers of horrors.
Vindice, a dispossessed malcontent, cuts a swathe through a decadent Italian court after the death of his fiancee. His masterstroke is to dress his betrothed's skull in court attire, poison her lips and then persuade the corrupt duke to kiss them. But Vindice, in his obsessive desire for vengeance, also exposes the ambition, lust and chicanery of this enclosed, aristocratic world.
The piece is vigorously acted by a young company and my only caveat is that they could do more to savour the salty wit of the language. Vindice is satirist as well as slaughterer: surveying his fiancee's adorned skull, he reflects on women's love of cosmetic luxury "when many an infant starves for her superfluous outside". Ben Worth gives us all of Vindice's anger but rather less of the sardonic reflectiveness that accompanies it.
Duncan Harte, however, as Vindice's brother, gives full value to those magnificent lines "there's gunpowder i' the court, wildfire at midnight". And McAleese's production offers a highly theatrical experience: you feel you have stepped into an underground world seething with vanity, villainy and an omnipresent sense of death.
· Until August 14. Box office: 07879 615408.
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