Joanna Baillie published this torrid verse tragedy, from the first volume of her collection Plays on the Passions, in 1798. Her intention was to write a series of dramas, each exploring an intense psychological state - and here she favours that concept over character and plot. The subject of De Monfort is hatred, an emotion with which its titular antihero is required to froth and flail extravagantly, despite an absence of provocation.

First produced in 1800 starring John Kemble and Sarah Siddons, and later revived with Edmund Kean, De Monfort seems to have appealed to the leading actors of the day, possibly because of its scope for breast-beating thespian excess. Its lurid Gothic aesthetic feels akin to melodrama, which was then emerging, though Baillie was aiming for greater sophistication than that of those popular plays, with their stock heroes, villains and damsels in distress.

De Monfort hates Rezenvelt. Why? He just does: “I loathed thee when a boy!” he splutters. His aversion has become all-consuming, which distresses his noble sister, Jane. A suspicion that Rezenvelt has designs on Jane's virtue proves the tipping point; the outcome is bloody. This paucity of action is stretched over nearly two and a half hours, made more inexorable by Baillie's tortured language and plodding verse.

The effect is compounded by Imogen Bond's awkward production, featuring a raised central platform across which actors shout at one another. In one notably silly scene, Justin Avoth's De Monfort, having slaughtered Rezenvelt, is seized by regret and attempts to dash out his brains on the floor. Jane arrives, and casts a fretful eye over the carnage wrought by De Monfort. “Unhappy Rezenvelt!” she remarks bathetically.

The actors struggle valiantly to lend conviction to Baillie's lines, and the hardworking Avoth, with his dark curls, has the right Romantic mien. But, after the Finborough's current production of Witchcraft, this is the second unrewarding Baillie revival in a week; let's hope it's a while before anyone else rediscovers her.

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