In many ways this is a traditional production, honouring its period setting. But its moments of gravity are signaled a little clumsily, and when it tries to be sexy it doesn’t satisfy. There are times when the energy drops and Webster’s imperfect command of structure is obvious. The general air of portentousness is redeemed by Best, who’s superb.

Verdict: ***
Click here to see the full review

The great Eve Best seizes all her chances here, giving a thrilling, sexy and often deeply moving performance in Jamie Lloyd’s gripping, atmospheric production.

Soutra Gilmour’s stunning design conjures up a dark Renaissance palace of gilded staircases, vertiginous pillars and flickering candlelight. The actors are sometimes masked and perform choreographed movements suggesting a dance of death, and the famous horrors, ranging from a severed hand to a poisoned Bible – which led George Bernard Shaw to dub Webster the “Tussaud Laureate” – are staged with ghoulish aplomb.

Verdict: ****
Click here to see the full review

With the exception of a version in Northampton featuring madrigals, Webster's grisly Jacobean masterpiece has been poorly served in recent years. But Jamie Lloyd has come up with that comparative rarity these days: a classical revival that delights in the original's language and period setting. And Eve Best gives a compelling performance that measures up to such past duchesses as Helen Mirren and Harriet Walter.

Verdict: ****


Click here to see the full review

This is a tremendous Italianate revival by Jamie Lloyd of one of the greatest plays in the language, a display of glittering jewels on the dung heap of a perverted court, where Mark Bonnar’s full-on bitter Bosola (“the only court gall”) is hired to expose the private life of their own widowed sister by a corrupt cardinal and an obsessive wolf man.

These two – Finbar Lynch in a scarlet cassock and a huge black leather sling (a kinkily appropriate costume accessory necessitated by a broken arm) and an icily sadistic Harry Lloyd – create an axis of evil unimaginable even in these dog days of phone hacking and tweeted calumnies. The story is horrific because you know it happened.

Verdict: *****
Click here to see the full review

But the stand-out performance comes from Best, and when she is on stage this production makes sense, but its weaknesses become apparent when she is not. She is terrific as the Duchess - magisterial and minx-like with her husband, playfully naïve with her brothers and finally heartbreakingly stoic as she meets her death while forgiving her killers. Her death scene - unusually and upsettingly protracted, the longest I've seen it played – is memorable.
Click here to see the full review