It seems crazy that Thomas Otway’s once popular 1682 tragedy has not had a major revival in 35 years. It proves to be gripping, edge-of-the-seat stuff in this dark, brooding modern-dress production that its director, Prasanna Puwanarajah, describes as “Restoration noir”, and that is visibly indebted to that strand of 1980s cyberpunk movies typified by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
The transposition makes sense since Otway’s play is about a thwarted conspiracy against a corrupt government: in this case, the Venetian senate. Otway does not hide the fact that the two main plotters, Jaffeir and Pierre, are driven as much by personal grievance as by political idealism. But what this production brings out vividly is the way the story is held together by sado-masochism and disguise. The jumpy Jaffeir’s relationship to the more purposeful Pierre is full of a guilty subservience that leads him, after he has betrayed their cause, to offer to lie at his friend’s feet and “kiss ’em though they spurn me”. This finds its echo in the famous subplot in which a kinky senator craves sexual punishment at the hands of a dominatrix: when John Hodgkinson (on superb form as a pillar of the Establishment) privately cries “spit in my face a little, Nacky” to Natalie Dew’s black-leathered courtesan, we seem to hear the voice of hypocrisy down the ages.
Duplicity and doubleness are constant themes of this production. The senators disguise their corruption under gold masks while the conspirators meet in dank, underground cells and are identified by internet passwords. Michael Grady-Hall also brings out Jaffeir’s vacillating neurosis and homoerotic dependence on Pierre. As the plot falls apart, he cruelly cries to his mistreated wife, Belvidera: “Where’s my friend, thou smiling mischief?” Stephen Fewell, meanwhile, invests Pierre with the ruthless single-mindedness of a former soldier turning against the state; and Jodie McNee, going mad in a denim mac, vibrantly shows that the play is the tragedy of Belvidera, trapped in a world of competing male egos. It is good to see an unjustly neglected work so stirringly restored.
• At the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 7 September.
