Speaking Like Magpies, Swan, Stratford

Speaking Like Magpies portrays James as a deeply scarred, spasmodically insane ruler whose crack-ups and paranoid crack-downs only encourage the likes of Catesby. In spite of his royal speeches about unity and tolerance, his twisted hatred of Catholics soon erupts. William Houston plays the monarch with an unsettling mix of infantile neediness and feral savagery. We first encounter him having nightmare visions of predatory papists, leaping from his bed and screaming. He then confides in a kind of imaginary friend: a curious, suspect creature called The Equivocator, played by the impish actor Kevin Harvey with horns and rather splendid hairy goat's legs.

James helpfully tells The Equivocator his backstory: how he was mercilessly beaten by his tutor at a formative age, supposedly to purge him of his Catholic mother's wickedness. Now, we gather, he prefers men to his bitter queen. After that, I'm afraid, Speaking Like Magpies becomes increasingly garbled. Director Rupert Goold struggles to liven things up with sizzling fuses and Houston flying overhead in a harness.

The playwright is surely well intentioned too. He is trying to embrace elements from medieval and Renaissance literature, so you have verse-speaking and that allegorical figure of equivocation wandering around, seeding doubts in many a riven character. However, the storyline consequently slows to a crawl and the historical facts get lost in a welter of poetic imagery and hallucinations.

The season's previous fare has been more exciting - especially Thomas More and Sejanus which transfer to London soon - but this one is a damp squib. Remember, remember, the fifth of November. How did it go? Gunpowder, treason and Frank McGuinness losing the plot?

To 5 November, 0870 609 1110