The Swan's season of dramatic rarities struck gold with Eastward Ho! It does so again with Philip Massinger's The Roman Actor: a robust Caroline tragedy, dating from 1626, of political tyranny and the dubious power of theatre, rendered with just the right degree of irony by director Sean Holmes and Antony Sher as the madly decadent Domitian Caesar.
The irony is justified, since Massinger himself subverts the idea, advanced by the noble tragedian Paris, of theatre as a force for good. Paris himself turns out to be an obsequious toady in Domitian's heady presence. An old miser, confronted by a play caricaturing his vice, remains stubbornly unreformed. And the emperor's mistress, Domitia, is so smitten by Paris that she turns into a greasepaint groupie who attempts to seduce the star player. Even the emperor himself turns actor, in an echo of The Spanish Tragedy, in order to excute revenge. Far from a moral force, theatre turns out to be a corrupting illusion.
Although Massinger's message is that theatre is a drug, his play survives as an actors' vehicle. It gives Sher a chance to add Domitian to his repertoire of hypnotic villains. First seen atop a russet tower like a mummified god, Sher soon shows his gift for making evil seductive. He notes his murders in a little black book. At one point he spins on his heel, hoping to catch his courtiers in a sullen look. He conveys the narcissism of tyranny, crying, as he awaits his downfall, "how do I look?" In a play packed with theatrical metaphors, he suggests even dictators are actors.
It is a dazzling performance layered with more than a hint of theatrical camp. But the point of Holmes's production is that tyrants are showmen, while tragedians like Paris strive to achieve a desperate sincerity. Joe Dixon, in fact, delivers Paris's famous oration on the virtues of theatre with parsonical earnestness; even when he is being seduced by Anna Madeley's glamorous, diaphanously dressed Domitia, he reacts a bit like a compromised head prefect. It is the courtiers who are the real actors, even down to Michael Thomas's wonderfully hawkeyed spy who observes all with cool omniscience.
Even if tongues are sometimes too firmly in cheeks, it is a richly inventive production, in which Adrian Lee's music plays a big part in suggesting the court is a place of crazed ritual.
The joy of the evening is that it starts by suggesting theatre is a moral force, and ends by demonstrating it is a house of seductive games.
In rep until September 13. Box office: 01789 403403.
