Bloody Classic | Mike Finn’s adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s play The Revenger’s Tragedy is the final production in the Limerick Theatre Hub’s Element’s quartet, staged in association with the Belltable Arts Centre and The Arts Council |  Sarah learns more about this gory plot

The Revenger’s Tragedy is a violent tale about Vinnie, who returns from England bent on avenging the death of his girlfriend at the hands of the notorious Duke. I asked Mike what attracted him to Middleton’s nefarious Elizabethan tale. “I was attracted by the title, plays titles are very important to me and The Revenger’s Tragedy says it all really. It’s a very bloody play to start, a real Jacobean tragedy.”

How do you stage a Jacobean tragedy for a modern audience? “ These plays tend to be incredibly dense, the original has twenty speaking parts so I combined a lot of the characters. The original plan was to update it almost entirely with entirely new dialogue. When we did a rehearsed reading of the original we found that some of the language is really beautiful. It’s quite heavy but there are some beautiful turns of phrase so I realised I wasn’t going to replace those with anything more beautiful and so we’ve kept some of the original dialogue. What I tried to do with the contemporary dialogue was to heighten it so the two wouldn’t jar together so we have a  mix of the original script and new dialogue.”

This modern adaptation has six characters the majority of whom were cast with well known local actors, “ From early on we decided that Liam O’ Brien who’s a member of our company would play Vinnie the central character so we cast around that. We have some great actors in town and we wanted to use local actors where possible, and so we have Aidan Crowe and Liam O’ Brien who are both from Limerick. We auditioned them, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion but we were really hoping that they would be available and up for it. Gene Rooney who will be familiar to audiences is in the play and Killinaskully’s Pascal Scott, who we are really lucky to have playing the central role of the Duke, he is the lynchpin of the whole family. Also we have a really young actress from Cork, Dorothy Cotter who I haven’t worked with before, she came and auditioned and was absolutely fabulous.”

With another set design from the brilliant Emma Fisher and lighting design by David O’ Brien audiences are in for a visual treat. The Revenger’s Tragedy will be scored with original music from GiveAManAKick’s Stephen Ryan, “We wanted original music, it’s something that doesn’t happen in the theatre that often and Steven is absolutely fabulous, he has given us some some early samples and it’s just amazing. This way the music will be much more integrated and hopefully it will add to the emotional impact of the play.”

So what can people expect from The Revenger’s Tragedy? “When I came to the script I thought it would be a very dark bloody revenge tale, but it’s actually really funny. Some of the murders are quite comical and as is common with Elizabethan dramas there are a lot of misunderstandings; cases of mistaken identity and the wrong people getting killed, corpses getting killed for a second time. It’s almost like a farce. I hope people won’t be put off thinking it’s a terrible maudin drama, it’s pretty dramatic, I would like to think that it has some sort of a point to it but it’s very funny aswell.  It’s been compared with Hamlet who is also trying to get revenge but he spends an awful lot of time dithering about it, it’s quite philosophical but inThe Revenger’s Tragedy Vinnie doesn’t think about it as much he just gets straight into it. So there’s everything; there’s lust, there’s revenge, there’s rock n’ roll, there’s sex, there’s drugs, we’ve thrown everything at it and hopefully it will all come out in the wash.”