Review: Women Beware Women

If, like me, you need reassurance before committing to three hours of Jacobean tragedy, the name Marianne Elliott should do the trick.

Elliott is the director of the National's stonking hit War Horse, now packing 'em in, and raking it in, in the West End. And what she did with Michael Morpurgo's moving but thin First World War story she has also done with Thomas Middleton's 1622 revenge tragedy - that is, turned it into a time-crunching epic upon which the eye can feast even if occasionally the brain and the heart get peckish.

For instance, exactly why Harriet Walter's strangely motivated Livia, a Florentine grande dame, delivers newly-wed Bianca to the Duke to be raped; why she induces her niece into the bed of her uncle; why she sees in Bianca's nebbish husband a stud who can reignite her love life, is never convincingly explained. Though it is all grippingly staged.

It is enough - just - to establish 17th-century Florence's corruption and decadence, hinted at by designer Lez Brotherston's revolving doric columns topped by a crumbling Medici sign. The action, however, is wrenched into the 20th century by the 1950s wardrobe and the strains of an off-stage cocktail-bar band.