Under Rupert Goold’s artistic directorship, Oxford Stage Company has entered a new era. Renamed Headlong Theatre, it launches its inaugural season, entitled Reinventing the Epic, with the first major revival of Edward Bond’s scintillating satire since the play opened at the Royal Court in 1981. Goold’s production is a bold and promising statement of intent. Bond’s text spits acid wit back into the grotesquely painted face of the ruling class. Exquisitely funny yet brimming with contained fury and disgust, it’s challenging, riveting and deeply disturbing — not least when it is making us laugh hardest.

Using theatrical archetypes from the Restoration stage, Bond holds a mirror up to a world where human beings are commodities to be exploited, and where the working class kill and die for the socially privileged. Foppish Lord Are (a creepily excellent Mark Lockyer), aristocratic but broke, marries the wealthy country squire’s daughter Ann Hardache for her money, but finds her a constant irritant. When he inadvertently stabs her to death over the breakfast table, he accuses his servant, Bob — who, socially conditioned to obey and to believe that unquestioning loyalty is the only route to advancement, keeps quiet about the deception. As Bob sits in prison in the shadow of the gallows, innocently awaiting the pardon he is convinced that his master will arrange, only Rose, his black wife and the daughter of a former slave, sees the hideous injustice that surrounds them, and its inevitable violent consequences.

The action is punctuated by songs set to jaunty new music by Adam Cork that supply a shocking commentary on the action. Rewritten material by the playwright updates the play’s searing socialist critique and exploration of the meaning of freedom from Thatcher’s Britain to Blair’s: lyrics about suicide bombers and terrorist plots sit alongside timeless images of brutality such as the slaughter of a terrified calf, symbol of a powerless individual condemned to bloody death.

Goold’s production appalls as it amuses, relentlessly confronting us with our willingness to laugh at cruelty when it is packaged as a social norm and silkily beribboned with elegant language and manners.

Colin Richmond’s design, with its absurd wigs and deathly make-up, and Oliver Fenwick’s shadowy lighting give the performers a nightmarish, monstrous aspect; and the acting absorbingly makes the transition from queasy comedy to horror. The play has an inescapable didacticism, but Goold teaches its lesson with passion and flair. Frighteningly relevant; frighteningly good.

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