Theatre - Katherine Duncan-Jones on a classical tale with touches of Tarantino

Philip Massinger began his long career as playwright for the Stuart King's Men in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death. He often used realistic comedy to develop his predecessor Shakespeare's aphorism that "all the world's a stage". But the world that his tragedy The Roman Actor (1626) brings alive is a nightmarish one of arbitrary violence, coercion and cruelty. All of its jokes are black, and some of its horrors are so extreme as to prompt bursts of hysterical laughter in the audience.

Sean Holmes's pacy production delivers the text's full Tarantinoesque horror. Even before the opening words have been spoken - "What do we act today?" - we witness, or we think we witness, one Roman soldier cut another's throat in a brutally vicious sword fight that threatens to tumble into the front rows of the auditorium. Later, the onstage torturing of two Stoic senators with meat hooks is too distressing to watch. Rarely have the boundaries that separate theatrical performance from "real" speech and action seemed more fragile.

In the opening scenes, Roman actors face interrogation and likely death for the skilful mockery that can "Make even the senators ridiculous/To the plebeians". In front of the Senate, however, the players are required to "act themselves", and do so triumphantly. Their star tragedian Paris defends the morally educative power of acting in speeches that were to be converted into freestanding monologues by such Victorian actors as Macready and Kean. Joe Dixon's Paris is at once charismatic and complex. He commands the Swan Theatre's small stage with his impressive physique and air of baffled integrity. However, the play's strongest performer of all is not the virtuous Paris, the Actor of the title, but the revoltingly cruel Domitian Caesar, whose performance of tyranny has brought an empire to its knees in terror. Antony Sher's white-skulled emperor extends his conquests even further by repeatedly subduing the tittering Swan audience into distinctly uncomfortable silence.

Three plays-within-the-play are brilliantly differentiated in genre and performance style. Jeanette Nelson should be congratulated for her voice coaching. The first playlet, The Cure of Avarice, is an old-fashioned didactic interlude. It is entertaining in its own terms, but doesn't work: the "real" usurer gets cured instead with the hangman's rope. The second, Iphis and Anaxerete, works rather too well. The emperor's consort, Domitia, who herself has been coerced into enacting the role of loving spouse, is so star-struck and credulous that she can't distinguish play from reality, and needs to be reminded that "'Tis in jest". Anna Madeley brings a pleasing freshness to Domitia, which makes her smug triumph over the three resentful Roman ladies whom she has supplanted seem more naive than bitchy. Even her suicidal folly in wooing Paris seems credible. The emperor himself takes the leading role in the third playlet, The False Servant. He forgets his lines, but not his sword. As he had promised grimly to the character-actor Aesopus (Wayne Cater): "When I come to execution you shall find/No cause to laugh at me."

Originally performed in the small Blackfriars Playhouse, The Roman Actor is ideally suited to the Swan. It also provides a perfect showcase for Antony Sher. In an aptly metatheatrical way, his psychotic Emperor Domitian is riddled with echoes of his Tamburlaine, his Macbeth and his Richard III, this last all but explicit in the phantasmagoric scene in which, like Richard before Bosworth, he struggles with his demons and is abandoned by his protectress Minerva. There is a clever trick/black joke in the closing scene, which I shan't give away, except to mention that it makes ingenious use of the tradition in the "real" Stuart theatre that performances would have ended around five o'clock in the afternoon.

The Roman Actor is in rep at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (0870 609 1110), until 13 September

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