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.
The first pleasurable shock is on confronting Soutra Gilmour's massive set: a dark, labyrinthine mix of palace and prison calling to mind the sombre Italian engravings of Piranesi. And, although the production has its share of masked candlelit processions, the emphasis is on the central spiritual conflict.
On the one hand, there is the nihilist view of life as "a general mist of error", as expressed by Bosola and embodied by the corrupt Calabrian princes, Ferdinand and his brother, a cardinal. Against that there is a Christian concept of endurance and fortitude symbolised by the duchess, who, in marrying her steward, arouses the wrath of her violent siblings.
You can play it as an all-out chamber of horrors piece justifying Shaw's description of Webster as the "Tussaud laureate". But I was struck by the restraint of Lloyd's production: the moment when the unhinged Ferdinand gives the duchess a severed hand is swathed in darkness. And when he presents her with a wax image of her supposedly dead husband and child, she has the good taste to keep her back to it.
At the same time, the production makes sexually explicit the incestuous passion of Ferdinand for his sister, and it is unafraid to show the reality of death: not since Hitchcock's Torn Curtain have I seen a strangling as protracted and plausible as the duchess's.
It is Best, however, who is the star. From her first entrance, bathed in light, she offers a symbolic contrast to the rank gloom of court life. There is also growth in her performance. She is playful, skittish and occasionally imperious with her secret husband, Antonio. But Best shows how through adversity the duchess gains moral stature. With a stricken horror, she repels Ferdiand's lustful kisses, and she greets death not with operatic defiance but stoical patience. Nothing is more moving than when she turns to her executioners and simply says, "I forgive them." The grand duchess, in Best's hands, is shown finally to be a humble woman.
For a secret intelligencer and court spy, Mark Bonnar's Bosola seems oddly determined to shout his discoveries to the four winds; but, like Best, he conveys the character's moral progress. Harry Lloyd, on the other hand, captures Ferdinand's decline into wolf-impersonating insanity with a chilling quietude and avoidance of rant. Finbar Lynch as his brother suggests all the cardinal vices and has the right air of cold concupiscence, and there is sure support from Tom Bateman as a naive steward who finds himself drawn into this world of aristocratic violence.
But the chief pleasure lies in encountering a production that, for all its incense-laden atmosphere, allows Webster's aphoristic poetry to do its vital work.
