Gunpowder season and plots

The Royal Shakespeare Company's Gunpowder Season of unknown Jacobean and Elizabethan plays flares to life with a fascinating rediscovery. A New Way to Please you, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, is a black satirical comedy with some contemporary resonance.

The play's plot and counter-plot hinge upon the barbaric fiat of some mythical Duke in ancient Greece. He decrees that men reaching the age of 80 and women turning 60 must be killed. Since, however, the play was probably first performed in 1618, it does not belong to the genre of drama infected by the national anxiety attendant upon the Catholic in 1605 to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

Our own youth-obsessed society merely debates the rights of mortally ill old people - and their younger counterparts - to euthanasia. In these circumstances, director Sean Holmes's decision to dress the play up as if it were a contemporary piece strikes me as a dumbing-down, disastrous mistake.

A Gunpowder Season ought to be teaching us lessons about Jacobean society, not obliterating them. The play works as a veiled allegory, criticising James I's belief that kings had absolute right to stand above the law. Yet Peter de Jersey's bland young Duke, who institutes the ageist reign of terror and then abruptly ends it, ought to be a recognisable stand-in for the testy monarch.

How dismaying, then, to find Holmes converting this cruel satire into a slightly amusing, farcical romp for 2005. Thomas Middleton, famous for his tragedies The Changeling and Women, Beware Women, was possessed of a bleak, sardonic view of humanity and politically motivated fervour: his 1624 play, A Game at Chess,was banned by an enraged monarch.

Holmes, however, behaves like some theatrical hygienist, cleansing the play of its murkier aspects. The actors whitewash their characters - unnatural, candid opportunists eager to inherit money or remarry, glad to see a father, husband or wife facing death.

Jonjo O'Neill plays Simonides, welcoming his father's demise with the voice and winsome manners of Graham Norton. Miranda Colchester's Eugenia trawls prematurely for a new husband while James Hayes, gross as her ancient spouse, leaps and capers in a wig. Fred Ridgeway's Gnotho, eager to dispose of his old wife, lacks a sharp edge and Matt Ryan, as a Hamlet-like good son, is wreathed in heartfelt smugness. What missed potential!

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A New Way To Please You