It's lust and gory!

IT’S easy to lose track as the body count mounts in this extremely dark tale of Latin plotting, power and politics and eventually it seems not so much a lust for glory as sheer lust and downright gory.

Corruption and violence, as well as sex, is prevalent throughout this latest take on John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy of a not so everyday Italian family. There are several stabbings, a poisoning plus garrotting and a shoot-out! So pity the poor person who has the job of cleaning up the stage after each performance...

Slotted into the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘Roaring Girls’ season – serving and celebrating part of the original purpose of the Swan as a home for the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries – this third of four plays in the series features women who are not only powerful and fascinating but subjugated.

They’re very important in the context of this complex play and director Maria Aberg, whose vision provides a modern day Italy – complete with vibrant and at times haunting music, also manages to induce strong performances from the key female characters as they plot affairs and murder.

Kirsty Bushell ensures a fiery and purposeful but ultimately tragic Vittoria earns a shred of sympathy as she battles to shed a woman’s traditional role of the times, while there’s a considerably eye-catching cross-dressed Laura Elphinstone, whose performance as Flaminio, usually a male role, was as sleek as her short slick-backed hair. Not only men, it would appear, can scheme their way to power with sex the bargaining tool.

They get excellent backing from a strong cast in which Colin Anthony Brown impressed as the Cardinal of Aragon, along with Simon Scardifield’s Franciso, the Duke of Florence, Jay Simpson’s waspish lawyer and in particular David Sturzaker’s Duke Bracciano and his prolonged poisoning.

Props are at a bare minimum on a set about as bleak as the events that unfold in and in front of what could have been a store window in a shopping mall where the mannequins come to life. Not quite ‘The Cube’ but an oblong housing wild parties and dramatic events.

Full of robust dialogue that is fairly fruity at times, and with plenty of onstage energy and excellent choreography, the end product nevertheless provides a stark reminder there is an amoral world out there and that equal opportunity still has a long way to travel.

• Performance time is 2hrs 25mins plus a20 minute interval.