How well our barbarous and sex-crazed times relate to the horrors and refined cruelties of Thomas Middleton’s extraordinary Jacobean masterpiece, whose hero’s necrophilic adoration of his fiancée’s skull inspired me to rare shudders last night.

No wonder director Melly Still dressed her dynamically acted production of The Revenger’s Tragedy in contemporary jeans, trouser suits and T-shirts, yet placed it conventionally in 17th century Italian court society. This fusion of ancient and modern strikes all the right notes: masque, athletic dancers leap both to underground club sounds by Different Gear and to Adrian Sutton’s traditional, religious music. A superlative, revolve-stage design by Ti Green and Still reeks of rancid grandeur, with translucent, voluptuous Renaissance paintings dominating each grand, pillared room, while shady, sexy characters dally and wander in narrow corridors. Conversely, thanks to computer technology, a picture of the face of the hero’s dead fianceé is transformed into a skull and back to pictorial life.

It is 40 years since the last London production of The Revenger’s Tragedy, when the Royal Shakespeare Company alerted modern audiences to a drama that makes grim, poetic fun of lust-filled aristocrats and lesser folk up to plenty of bad, some of them steaming hot for sex, adultery, murder and revenge. Middleton steers a precarious line between high pathos and black comedy. Still’s revival, while never inviting cheap laughs, misses the playwright’s terrible grandeur. For she casts that talented comic actor Rory Kinnear as the sardonic, but emotionally wracked and wrecked revenger, Vindice. Kinnear expertly conveys the hero’s comic relish for plotting, disguise and deception, but little of Vindice’s lyrical anguish or poetic fanaticism.

Middleton’s complex revenge plot is staged in an Italy representing the corrupted,luxury-prone court of James I. Sex drives the action and it drives it as wild and strange as anything in mainline Jacobean drama. Kept in an old shoe box (a modern touch, this) lies the skull of Vindice’s fiancée, who was long since poisoned by Ken Bones’s sinister Duke for refusing sex. The Duke’s son Lussurioso — impressively played by silver-shoed, athletic Elliott Cowan who resembles a rugby forward hot for the next sex game — confesses a longing for virtuous Castiza (Katherine Manners) who happens to be Vindice’s sister. The testing of Castiza’s virtue runs in counterpoint to the main lines of Vindice’s revenge scheme, which reaches a ghastly, grotesque culmination in the strange meeting that Vindice arranges for the Duke with a new girl. The girl in question is that old skull again, poisoned of course and hidden behind a richly dressed effigy. The Duke’s sighting of his adulterous Duchess with his bastard son completes the torment.

Still brilliantly stages this amazing scene as a dance of death in the semi-dark, the murderous violence prolonged. It’s an action matched by the final masque when Vindice overreaches himself and ends up in the pile of dead — morality and justice restored to a world we have seen gone thrillingly to the bad, worse and back again.

Until 7 August, www.nationaltheatre.org.uk