At the climax of Middleton’s play an adulterous duke grabs what he thinks is a country girl, but is actually a dummy whose cute face hides a skull whose mouth is smeared with poison. Then his tongue is excised, he’s hauled off to watch his duchess have sex with his bastard son and he’s gloatingly eviscerated by the man whose betrothed he murdered long ago and who has come to court in disguise: Rory Kinnear’s tough, compelling and altogether aptly named Vindice.

Shaw called Webster “the Tussaud laureate”, but, on the evidence of this Jacobean chamber of horrors, Middleton has a strong claim to that title. The play ends with nine bleeding corpses on stage: which, added to the violent deaths preceding them, far outnumbers the body count in Hamlet, the revenge tragedy that may have been in the young author’s mind when he savaged a corrupt society with the scorchingly intense, inventive verse that makes it impossible to dismiss his play as mere melodrama.

Think Sarah Kane and early Edward Bond, with Mark Ravenhill thrown in, and you’re closer to defining the imaginative punch of Melly Still’s modern-dress revival. But, boy, does it come with a wild and whirling plot. Ken Bones’s duke has a legitimate son, Elliot Cowan’s Lussurioso, who, at one typically bizarre point, orders Vindice to kill his own disguised self. He also has grasping, stupid stepsons, whose achievements include rape, plotting to get Lussurioso executed and ending up with one of their heads in a sack. And – but if I go on, I’ll disorient myself.

Anyway, the evening begins as it means to go on, with raucous rock accompanying the Olivier revolve as it reveals that vicious rape and scuttling figures who seem variously to come from Savile Row, revue-bar Soho and the insect house. Above are vast high-Renaissance paintings: mythic nudes with copulating courtiers just visible behind them and, giving moral perspective to the gaudy proceedings, a portrait of St Jerome and a statue of the Virgin perched above a red leather sofa.

I’m not saying that Middleton was a Jerome. There’s a sardonic and even sadistic glee in his poetry and, as Still proves, a lot of dark, dangerous laughter to be found in the play. But the characters’ names – Ambitioso, Supervacuo, Sordido – tell the actors that they should look for inspiration more to the 16th-century’s bold, blunt morality plays than to the sophistication of Hamlet. And that’s a challenge accepted by everyone, from a louche, sneering Cowan to Billy Carter as a chilling variation on Iago to Kinnear, who has the charisma and burly power to radiate what Middleton wanted: a global scorn that starts principled, becomes destructive, ends self-destructive.

Writing in The Times this week, Sam Marlowe was unimpressed when the play surfaced in Manchester. My feeling is that, if you’re mobile, this is the Revenger’s Tragedy to see.

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