Revenger's Tragedy

Directed by Alex Cox (Cert 15)

In 2011, a single man will ride out of somewhere or other to bring justice to a troubled town. His wife has been killed by the psychopathic father of a psychopathic family and now he wants revenge. Unfortunately in the process he'll get sucked into the very evil he fought against, and.... well, that would spoil the ending, but in Alex Cox's rollicking rollercoaster adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s 1606/7 play, it hardly matters; the emphasis is so much on style that the actors have to climb over the visuals to deliver their parts.

This they do for the most part extremely well; Christopher Eccleston towers over the film as the tortured and doomed hero Vindici. Locals Andrew Schofield and Carla Henry both distinguish themselves as his accomplice brother and sister, and apart from one misjudged cackle Margi Clarke turns in a fine, morally flawed, mother. Eddie Izzard is an excellent Lussorioso, the son of the evil Duke who befriends and is ultimately betrayed by Vindici, although there's little sense of the homoerotic confusion of the play. Derek Jacobi, as the evil Duke, a monster happy to kill any woman he can't rape, struggles manfully to be anything but sweet, and almost succeeds.

The film is let down by the supporting cast, a variable bunch who veer from capable to autocue, by a heavy handedness in its topicality and by the sheer lack of room to develop Vindici's moral decline. There's a lot going on.

What Cox does brilliantly is capture the chaos of Middleton. The playwright was a seventeenth century cyber-punk. His works are full of plot and the high tech trickery of the time; disguises, potions, magic and sexual chicanery all coming at you in a barely controlled, but occasionally stunning explosion. If Shakespeare's stage was a string quartet, Middleton's was a moshpit and Cox captures this beautifully. The low budget unfortunately means it's sometimes like watching a production for schools, albeit with a dream cast. The language is similar to but more accessible than Shakespeare's - Middleton just wasn't as good a poet – but like the film it's tough, dazzling (if flawed) and alive.

Well worth a look.