Afternoon:
14°c
Ministry of Defence spent £149 million on an "urgent" upgrade to 900 tanks that are now only being used in training exercises, it was revealed
More...
An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Melly Still.
Cast: Rory Kinnear, Adjoa Andoh, Tom Andrews, Ken Bones, Donatella Cabras, Billy Carter, Elliot Cowan, Conor Doyle, Barbara Flynn, John Heffernan, Peter Hinton, Derek Howard, Pieter Lawman, Jane Leaney, Tommy Luther, Katherine Manners, Rob McNeill, Pamela Merrick, Simon Nagra, Rick Nodine, Jamie Parker, Richard Shanks, Ross Waiton, Lizzie Winkler
Description: A Jacobean drama by Thomas Middleton exploring moral and political decay within a royal court. With Rory Kinnear as Vindice. Directed by Melly Still.
Trains: Tube/BR: Waterloo 
Phone: 0207452 3000
Website: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=1541
Head boy: Vindice (Rory Kinnear) with the skull of his girlfriend
How well our barbarous and sexcrazed 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.
Director Melly Still dresses her dynamically acted production of The Revenger's Tragedy in contemporary jeans, trouser-suits and T- shirts, yet places it conventionally in 17th-century Italian court society. This fusion of ancient and modern strikes all the right notes: 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 wh i le thanks to computer technology, a picture of the face of the hero's dead fiancée i s 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 lustfilled aristocrats, steaming hot for sex, adultery, murder and revenge.
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. The talented comic actor Rory Kinnear plays the sardonic, but emotionally racked and wrecked, revenger, Vindice. In an old shoe box (a modern touch, this) lies the skull of his 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, brilliantly staged as a dance of death in the semi-dark.
Justice is finally restored to a world we have seen gone thrillingly to the bad, worse and back again.
In rep until 28 August (www.nationaltheatre.org.uk)
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
