Olivier, National, SE1

Royal Exchange, Manchester

In the old days, everyone was sure The Revenger’s Tragedy was by Cyril Tourneur. Nowadays, everyone’s sure it’s by Thomas Middleton. The only thing I’m sure about is that it’s not a very good play.

The titular revenger is Vindice, an Italian courtier avenging the murder of his beloved Gloriana by the ruling duke. Meanwhile, the duke’s bastard son and stepsons are also set on a killing spree.

Unimaginatively misanthropic and messy, it doesn’t lend itself to a Shakespearian richness of interpretations. The more I see it, the more it seems there is really only one way to get through it: take it lightning fast, pitch the comedy as black as a barbecued crow and hope the audience won’t notice what a daft, implausible piece it is.

It was pretty much ignored for three centuries, until Trevor Nunn revived it in the 1960s; and now two come along at once. In the National’s version, directed by Melly Still, Rory Kinnear tries to play Vindice as a sympathetic character, but it can’t be done. Vindice may be hell-bent on righteous vengeance, but he still ends up torturing old men to death. We know what a fine comic actor Kinnear can be, but here he tries to be too sincere. There are also times when he comes over merely as a bit cross, rather than consumed to the marrow with sulphuric contemptus mundi. Ultimately, Vindice is no more likeable or admirable than anyone else here. Whoever wrote it was one serious malcontent. “Hate all I,” boasts the bastard Spurio at one point. It could be the play’s epigraph.

Elliot Cowan is simpler and better as the duke’s heir, Lussurioso. He and Kinnear make a real success of exchanging knotty Jacobean lines like a couple of blokes bragging in a bar. John Heffernan and Tom Andrews, as the duke’s stepsons, Supervacuo and Ambitioso (the names point to the complexity of character the author was aiming at), are hilarious studies in not so much the banality as the weediness of evil.

Yet the production as a whole is uneven. The huge Renaissance-style sets painted with images of Justitia, with her weighing scales and sword, are effective, and there are times when the great revolve is used to tremendous effect, suggesting scenes taking place beyond the text with understated ingenuity. At other times, however, it whizzes around pointlessly, suggesting nothing more than a child fiddling with a food mixer. The dancers are irritating, frolicking, getting in the way, standing on their hands or lying on their backs, wiggling their legs like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa.

Indeed, there are some grossly ill-judged things going on in the background. The text suggests with some subtlety this particular Renaissance court’s corruption, so do we have to have figures humping away distractingly as someone speaks in the fore-ground? Ditto the fresco back-drops having sequences from skin flicks projected onto them at one point – 1970s skin flicks, I’d guess, judging from the, er, hair styles. More absurd still is the glimpse of Lussurioso, just before he first steps on stage, pleasuring himself in a dark alley. Okay, so’s he a tosser, but is this required to ram the point home? We know he’s a bad’un anyway because he wears tight shiny trousers, silver winkle-pickers and, worst of all, sunglasses on his head.

The Manchester version of the play, directed by Jonathan Moore, is still more of a mess. This is a gloomy and confused production in which the best moments have nothing to do with the text, but are pure theatrical invention: heavenly light streaming up from Gloriana’s opened coffin; the clownish danse macabre with the corpse of the murdered duke, ending in not one but four simultaneous stabbings. The punk aesthetic is overdone, with snatches of songs by Killing Joke and the AntiNowhere League; the Brechtian interruptions are superfluous; and the scene in which cheery music is used to accompany brutality (My Favourite Things, from The Sound of Music) is reminiscent of a bad horror film.

Poorest of all, unfortunately, is Stephen Tompkinson as Vindice - or, rather, as Vindice in disguise, Piato. As Vindice, he’s acceptable, but as Piato he’s plain silly, a camp middle-aged goth in blue-tinted specs and a purple-streaked bouffant, speaking in a wheedling estuarial accent.

The Revenger’s Tragedy is often glibly seen as a play for today, in tune with our own darkly comic sensibilities and low view of human nature. (The Olivier programme comes with stills from Kill Bill to make the point.) But is it? It’s easy to underestimate how hard it is to stage well, to overestimate how close its world-view is to that of a modern audience, forgetting that it is seamed with references to sin and redemption, heaven and hell. The timing of the National’s production is unfortunate too. It is a play that depends on our finding the spectacle of everybody stabbing each other hilarious, at a time when a 15-year-old girl has been stabbed to death in a lift about 500yd from the theatre. Add to that the tongues cut out, the poisoned skulls kissed, the stomachs stomped on, the eyelids slit open and you begin to wish for something a bit more . . . uplifting. This is not a great play. It’s an old play that happens to have survived, the patina of age being mistaken for quality.

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