The Revenger’s Tragedy

36 Cecil Street, Limerick

“When the bad bleed the tragedy is good” is scrawled across the bare black wall of Emma Fisher’s scaffold set for Limerick Hub’s production of

The Revenger’s Tragedy

. As the credo of Thomas Middleton’s 17th-century anti-hero is transformed into a graffiti tag, so Mike Finn’s supple version of the Jacobean drama is thoroughly updated for a modern audience. The time is the present day. The place is the Duke’s Palace, a lap-dancing club and cocaine den, and a front for a family-run criminal gang that was responsible for the death of the eponymous exile’s lover.

Laden with contemporary cultural references and self-conscious quotations from some of Middleton's ancestors (Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Julietis an obvious visual reference, while The Sopranosand Quentin Tarantino get a nod in the text), Finn doesn't just make the classic play "relevant", he transforms its idiom entirely, engaging with both the gang culture that Limerick audiences will be no strangers to, and the defining genres of 21-century film and TV. If the juxtaposition of Middleton's iambic verse jars occasionally with the idiomatic Limerick cadences of Finn's writing, more often it actually gels, underscoring the vengeful Vinnie's corrupted honour and morality.

Liam O’Brien makes something of a pantomime villain from the complex Vindici, particularly towards the end of the play as the bloodbath begins. This is partly to do with his awkward soliloquies, which director Myles Breen fails to frame sufficiently, but it is also to do with the venue at 36 Cecil Street, whose auditorium lacks the necessary depth for an audience’s objective viewing; a more distanced configuration would suit the play’s aesthetic far better. There are also some fine performances, however, especially from Aidan Crowe as the luckless Spaz, bastard son and “uncertain man”, who eventually comes – like his brothers and father – to an awful end.

The original cinematic score by Steve Ryan is crucial in setting the tone for Limerick Hub’s excellent, final production. It is at once suspenseful and vaguely absurd, and it is crucial in facilitating a brilliant play of irony in the closing tableau, as Middleton and Finn’s vision of a godforsaken world is ready to be torn apart again as the cycle of revenge plays on.

Until November 21