Damascus, sacked and bloodied, is one of the many war-weary places glimpsed in Tamburlaine. Marlowe's glittering study of tyranny is hard to stage: swollen with rolling phrases, chopped about with short, vicious scenes and far-flung geography, but David Farr's production is so fine that it makes you feel that the theatre has been impoverished by seeing so little of this poetic dramatist. The treatment is bold. You expect one long hullabaloo: wave after wave of ranting and gore. Farr offers something more monumental.
Ti Green's marvellous design is richly coloured but unadorned: on an almost bare stage, tall, bright banners slowly unfurl; the different parts of Tamburlaine's expanding empire appear in turn, spotlit among the smoky air. A group of women in white burkas pleads for life; when they are massacred, they slip out of their garments, leaving them lying on the stage like shrouds.
This stateliness and simplicity makes the gruesomeness of the action more shocking. And there's no stinting on the grisly, what with several twitchingly realistic throat-severing incidents and the dashing out of brains by regal captives (the excellent Jeffery Kissoon and Ann Ogbomo). In what's proving to be the year of the theatrical vomit (the recent Agatha Christie revival contains a major example of the genre), there's also a graphic throwing-up episode.
Greg Hicks, who played the rape victim in the original Romans in Britain, is a matchless Tamburlaine, with his carved-looking face and graceful, intent movements. His conquering compulsion is unexplained, but you never forget he's a self-made despot; every now and then, you see his early life as a sheep-stealing yob.
He's as convincing when spearing a son for his pansy tendencies as when dissolving into grief at the deathbed of his wife. He is fully human and completely inscrutable.
