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)