Even in Jacobean drama's murky terrain no play is possessed by so mysterious or fascinating outbreak of sexual desire as Thomas Middelton's and William Rowley's The Changeling.
Not that a stranger to the play would gather this from Declan Donnellan's psychologically blank, unilluminating modern-dress production for his Cheek by Jowl company.
The Changeling should read and act as if its writers had jumped time and landed in Sigmund Freud's 20th-century consulting room for advice on its aristocratic heroine.
Yet the blanched, boring and sexually low-grade Beatrice Joanna of Olivia Williams is devoid of psychological insight.
There are scant signs of what appalls and then sexually enthralls Beatrice about her father's plain servant De Flores, whose facial blemishes were intended as symptoms of syphilis.
Why should any woman, sacrifice a lover and husband - Tom Hiddleston's insipid blond Alsemero - for such a man?
Strange, too, that Will Keen's admirably sinister, dead-calm De Flores, bearded, suited and inscrutable, should seem the social equal of his master and eventual mistress.
Keen murders with chilling, orgasmic violence, casually hacks off a finger.
Dead-calm confidence becomes him, yet since Beatrice has more of the air of a complaining nun than a voluptuary, the sexual electricity is turned off.
Donnellan's production focuses more on the dynamics of his bare, withoutdecor staging than performances.
The modernising touches irritate in a play where the mad-house controller (Tobias Beer) wields a whip and medicines to test for virginity work magically.
The stage is enlarged to its back walls, the auditorium reconstituted. Fan-shaped banks of seats give a sense of limbo yet outlaw scenic intimacy.
Beatrice's Catholic marriage ceremony, and her ultimate murder seen through a glass briefly remind one of Donnellan's otherwise absent directorial flair.
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Subplot scenes, set in an asylum where Jodie McNee's phlegmatic young wife to a jealous old doctor blandly resists two noblemen playing mad and stupid, are supposed to run in ironic counterpoint.
Donnellan plays them in blazing light, suggesting that here people's intentions are clear.
Those encounters where Beatrice and De Flores fall upon each other like spiders caught in sex's clutches are, by contrast, shrouded in darkness.
Yet, despite Donnellan's deficient production The Changeling still fascinates.
The Changeling
