Time Out Review

by Matt Trueman November 12-18 2009

Critics' Choice

  An eye for an eye may make the whole world blind, but fuzzy vision is not an affliction suffered by director Mitchell Moreno. He handles the original revenge tragedy (by sixteenth-century dramatist Thomas Kyd) with both care and flair, so that its knotty narrative untangles with a compelling brutality.

  Following a war with Portugal, the repercussions of a soldier's death ripple through the Spanish court. The similar dispatching of his romantic replacement, Horatio (Hasan Dixon), sparks a chain of retaliatory violence that sees off disloyal servants, mothers and murderers before finally resulting in the suicides of grieving lover Bel'Imperia (Charlie Covell) and Horatio's father Hieronimo (Dominic Rowan).

  Whittled down to a snappy two hours, there are echoes of Rupert Goold's 'Macbeth' in Moreno's claustrophobic, contemporary staging. Helen Goddard's bunker-like design invokes a bolted-up paranoia and there is the same sense of a very domestic violence as upstanding suburbanites, unaccustomed to homicide, grapple to rationalise their primitive responses. The strong ensemble is well led by Dominic Rowan as the indignant Hieronimo: Rowan plays him as a square civil servant swallowing his revulsion with a single malt. Crammed with sharp, potent images - bodies hanging like butchered meat and blood inching across tabletops - this Spanish tragedy displays a savvy approach to its modernisation, though Moreno does overplay his hand with a final play within a play which is too well versed in post-dramatic theory to convince in context. Nonetheless, this is as clear and gripping a production of Kyd's forgotten classic as you're likely to find.