The Duchess of Malfi, National Theatre, Lyttelton, London

It's six years since we last saw the commanding figure of Janet McTeer on stage. In 1997, as Nora in A Doll's House, she gave one of the most searching Ibsen performances that London has seen. She travelled with that production to New York, garnered a well-deserved Tony and was then by snapped up the movies. Was she, one had begun to wonder, lost for ever to live performance?

The answer, joyously, is no. In Phyllida Lloyd's stark, modern-dress production of The Duchess of Malfi in the Lyttelton, McTeer is back on the boards, giving a magnificent performance as John Webster's Jacobean heroine – a widow in the prime of life who defies her suffocatingly meddling and possessive brothers and embarks on a clandestine second marriage to her steward.

The horrors inflicted on the Duchess when her siblings discover her secret, can – if staged by the book – feel as hammy and as Hammer as a ride on a ghost train. The updating in Lloyd's production renovates our sense of the repulsive and psychologically warped nature of the torments the heroine is forced to endure. Instead of the usual embarrassing masque of madmen gibbering round her, McTeer's Duchess is strapped into a chair, injected with drugs, and forced to watch a hideous Clockwork Orange-like film that mixes her worst memories and most nightmarish fears.

Mark Thompson's design is steeped in Stygian gloom, with overtones of Scorsese and Coppola, and peopled by dark-suited heavies and corrupt clerics. True, the contemporary relocation makes plot devices like the poisoned prayer-book and household spies look a bit silly. But, in general, it works well. It releases the characters from the stock types of Jacobean central casting into a freshly creepy reality. As played by Lorcan Cranitch, Bosola, the intelligencer, appears a seedy nonentity who would not feel out of place in a book by Graham Greene. As the Duchess's disturbed brother, Ferdinand, Will Keen suggests superbly that he has displaced his own morbid self-distrust and sense of inadequacy with an obsessive sexual suspicion of her.

Poised, elegant, full of warmth, humour and humanity, McTeer's Duchess convinces at every stage of her journey – from her comic oieullades as she tries to restrain her impatience when the steward fails to cotton on to her sexual overtures, to the brave irony she displays in grief. This is a Duchess who, while giving it its due, never allows the poetry to put a decorative glaze on this woman's suffering. Her stoical defiance is splendid, but she delivers her final speeches with the uneven gasps of someone who has definitely not soared saint-like above earthly terrors.

To 27 May (020-7452 3000)