Main House: In Bed With Messalina

Writer Benjamin Askew has Renaissance aspirations. He has played fast and loose with Roman source material to write a lyrical drama packed with modern referents. The eponymous Messalina was a former dancer in Caligula's court who climbed the greasy pole to become third wife of Emperor Claudius, and was ultimately executed for plotting his murder. Notorious for her avariciousness and promiscuity (Juvenal called her the 'whore-empress' in his Satires), she dragged the Roman Empire into disrepute, which really took some doing. Askew's concept is to fuse this narrative with 'In Bed With Madonna', so the entire action is centred around a velvet-strewn bed upon which Messalina rants, yearns and writhes with her camp confidantes and a strange ropey looking rocker in a leather chair who seems to be her biographer. Owen Horsley's production is to be commended for containing assured performances, most notably from Kelly Hotten, who dispatches her disobliging partners with the cattish savagery of Blackadder's Queenie. Askew, meanwhile, has talent - he is alive to rhetorical rhythms, flourishes and the compound image. But sometimes the language is too densely poetic and the drama needs space to breathe.