The Revenger's Tragedy, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

I wonder if Stephen Tompkinson recognises The Revenger's Tragedy from his old A-level notes preserved by his dad? In director Jonathan Moore's somewhat eccentric approach to the drama – indulging his fascination with a mishmash of eclectic musical and cultural allusions, applying a wickedly funny gloss to a contemporary slant – there's a brilliantly anarchic undercurrent that will surely win this play new admirers, not least from those for whom it is a set text.

If the National's production (not yet open to critics) of the play, now assumed to be by Thomas Middleton, is anything like as compelling as that of Manchester Royal Exchange then theatregoers north and south of the Watford Gap will be in luck.

What reads like a complicated charade of confused identities and skewed communications, interrupted by often oblique asides, isn't easy to bring to the stage. It's not always helped here by Moore's maniacally marshalled production, in which – like Shakespeare on speed – a lot of tangential ideas, including occasional interaction between actors and stage management, are tossed around. Where Moore is most successful, apart from drawing some sharply nuanced portrayals from a uniformly creative cast, is in tapping Tompkinson's vein of apparent melancholy, his quixotic expressions and his mercurial characteristics.

Starring as the anti-hero Vindice, he carries off the several parts his character adopts with an engaging verve and, no doubt increasingly as the production settles, a reckless velocity. One of the funniest moments is when Vindice, in one disguise, is called upon to kill himself in another guise. The subsequent vaudevillian hoofing to the accompaniment of "The Sun Has Got Its Hat On" is delightfully funny, and nimbly accomplished.

In an invented prequel, we meet Tompkinson's Vindice first loving, then mourning, his mistress Gloriana. It is her murder – on the instruction of the royal lecher, the Duke – that the grief-stricken young man is driven to revenge. Skulduggery comes into play as Vindice uses his beloved's unearthed cranium to fire his vengeance then trap his victim. By the time he has wreaked his torturous revenge on the ducal head of a dissolute, depraved and corrupt Italian house, it seems as though we can all go home.

But no, Vindice, initially fuelled by an impotent frustration (clearly not something that afflicts the royal roués) is now drunk on retribution.

Corrupted by those same values he despised in his enemy, he pursues the Duke's repellent offspring in a further two acts climaxing in a bloody, masqued finale which, though airily executed to a sinisterly tinkling tune, must bring tears to the eyes of those responsible for laundering the costumes.

To the extremes of the virtue and vice explored in The Revenger's Tragedy is added a vileness in characterisation, notably Robert Demeger's horribly suave Duke, Jonathan Keeble's stentorian, sleazy Lussurioso and Eileen O'Brien's morally dubious Gratiana. Apart from an amusing shower scene, the action is remarkably stark in setting, confined mainly to the mosaicked floor of a palazzo whose crumbling foundations, strewn with old bones, reveal past grim deeds. The balance in tragicomedy is crucial but when so nearly perfectly achieved, in a production that rarely relaxes its grip, revenge has seldom been sweeter.