From zero to hero

Opening the RSC's repertory season, Dominic Cooke treats John Marston's Jacobean political satire like a louche high-spirited comedy, rather than the dark misanthropic piece it has the potential to be. Setting it in a Latin American banana republic, it could easily be the plot of a Marx Brothers film. The hero, played by Anthony Sher, is a deranged dosser who is the republic's ousted ruler. In this hobo disguise, he chastises and badmouths-everyone at court until he regains his crown.

How and why such a ranting loon would be accepted in any household, let alone on a balcony overlooking the corridors of power, is hard to imagine. Rightly, this doesn't bother Sher, who gleefully ridicules all and sundry, firing off Marston's fabulous tirades. He even squeezes in a reference to 'Irish men's bum cracks' - a sight still familiar at roadworks today.

Elsewhere, there are equally amusing but unchallenging anomalies. Joe Dixon as Sher's chief antagonist is a strangely selfconscious-megalomaniac, setting up murders one minute and dandyishly worried about his sexual reputation the next. Then again, when the ruling duchess takes a young lover, he is played as obviously and inexplicably gay. What's in it for him, one wonders? What's in it for the audience is an amusing couple of hours before Marston's formulaic finale.

In rep until Jan 25, Gielgud Theatre, 33 Shaftesbury Avenue W1, 7.30pm, mats 2.30pm, £15 to £37.50.

Tel: 020 7494 5065. Tube: Piccadilly Circus

The Malcontent