Studio I: The Spanish Tragedy

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 dramatis 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 rationalize their primitive passions. The strong ensemble is well-led by Dominic Rowan as the indignant Hieronim: 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 modernization, 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.