Is it a parallel too far?

When Philip Massinger's Believe What You Will received its first professional production since 1631, during last year's admired Gunpowder Season at Stratford-upon-Avon, critics savoured Josie Rourke's revival for the renewed topicality of its political allegory.

Yet having missed the play in 2005, I now wonder whether the compelling eeriness of its application to America's super-power belligerence in the Middle East today, and even to England during Charles I's 11 years of personal rule, caused Believe What You Will to be overrated as dramatic entertainment.

The piece runs a protracted and long-suffering course, in which the mighty Roman Empire harries, hunts and tortures Peter de Jersey's agonised, virtuous
king who emerges from 22 years in hiding to reclaim his throne.

Since the monarch in question - Antiochus of Lower Asia - threatens Roman interests and could rally rebellion in their over-taxed provinces, no wonder William Houston's Titus Flaminius, Roman ambassador to Carthage, is on hand: any country rash enough to offer the rediscovered king support will face violent retaliation. As for Antiochus himself, why aside from damning him as an impostor, there is always imprisonment and exquisite torture to bring the man to his knees - and further down.

Houston, fresh from all manner of depravity in Ben Jonson's Sejanus, offers another riveting impression of the psychopathic, politically motivated overreacher, who offers "necessity of state" as his driving, dangerous compulsion.

Rulers and countries treat him with all the care reserved for a dangerous wild card. Jaunty, jocular and haughty, with a smile playing on his lips like some sinister tune, Houston's Titus enjoys his own unnerving predictability: he switches from calm to violent fury in a trice.

De Jersey's Antiochus, variously shaven, chained, half starved and wholly tempted by a deceiving Courtesan, takes to suffering with rather too much elocuting enthusiasm until salvation arrives. "A greater power does raise or pull down kings," the play ends, ominously predicting the Civil War perhaps.

Miss Rourke's production, acted on Stephen Brimson Lewis's bare, unevocative stage, sensibly avoids any crude modern-dress parallels. Dressed in Arab costumes, it is pitched atmospherically in a 17th-century Arab world.

There is, though, the problem of following the plot's convolutions and mass of passing characters, since the RSC as usual treats its audience with indifference and fails in the programme properly to identify the dramatis personae.

Until 11 February. Information: 0870 060 6632

Believe What You Will