Violence and sexual transgression are the stuff of John Ford’s revenge tragedy, and Edward Dick’s slick, speedy production sends the play plummeting headlong into hell. Various characters and subplots are sliced out of the text, placing the focus firmly on the incestuous love between the young intellectual Giovanni and his lovely sister Annabella. This intensifies the excitement of the drama’s emotional and moral helter skelter — although it does so, to some degree, at the cost of context.

Dick’s modern-dress staging, designed by Simon Holdsworth, is performed on a narrow cruciform walkway that brings every bloody excess of the action uncomfortably close to the viewer and emphasises the over-arching influence of the Catholic church in the play’s Italianate setting.

Corruption is rampant amid the smoking censers, with Parma’s cardinal, in the aftermath of the climactic bloodbath, seizing the wealth of the slaughtered, and the friar who is supposedly Giovanni’s spiritual mentor only too eager to wash his hands of his troubled charge. This is a world divorced from all sense of responsibility, where wrongdoers throw themselves on God’s mercy or blame fate, and where Giovanni and Annabella’s love has a twisted purity in a venal and hypocritical society.

Dick’s abridged version plays down the extent to which Annabella is beleaguered by ignoble suitors for her hand, and so misses out on the contrast between their pragmatism and Giovanni’s passion. And the excision of a cuckolded husband’s plot against Soranzo, the heartless lover Annabella is eventually forced to wed, lessens the sense that the siblings’ relationship is a shelter from a terrifying, lawless environment.

There are moments, too, when the actors’ understated delivery seems at odds with Ford’s lush language. But the production has a thrilling immediacy and a filmic fluidity, supported by Paddy Cunneen’s pulsing music and Rick Fisher’s splendidly atmospheric lighting.

Charlie Cox’s bright-eyed Giovanni is a fine mix of male youthful insensitivity and tormented tenderness, if a little vocally underpowered. Mariah Gale’s Annabella is superb, a trembling, vulnerable girl conscious of her sexual puissance but desperate for guidance she certainly doesn’t get from her guardian, Janet Spencer-Turner’s brittle, power-suited Putana.

Also impressive are Laurence Fox’s chilly Soranzo, Dominic Colenso as his slippery servant and Sarah Paul as Hippolita, a woman wronged by Soranzo whose bellydance at his wedding feast is an eye-catching act of sexual aggression. Some of Dick’s cuts may be unkind; but his production is quite a ride.

Box office: 08700 601 761