[In the review below, De Jongh applauds Michael Boyd's 1995 staging of The Broken Heart at London's Barbican Theatre as "a spectacular but truthful performance, brimming with sardonic humour and emotional dynamism. "]

Three hundred and sixty-two years after its London premiere, John Ford's revenge drama of arranged marriages and refined cruelty, with women at the mercy of male power, still speaks with rare immediacy.

And Michael Boyd's enthralling Royal Shakespeare Company production, greatly admired at Stratford last autumn, reaches London further improved. The memorable acting of Iain Glen and Emma Fielding as the lovers doomed never to have their fill of each other, or indeed to have each other at all, ought to wring even metal-plated hearts. The excitement of Boyd's production depends upon the way it represses and controls high emotion through dance and ritual ceremonies.

Tom Piper's pillared, curtained stage, with horizontal aluminium shutters, reveals frozen tableaux—from orderly court life to the spectacle of Ithocles (Robert Bowman) and his veiled sister Penthea (Emma Fielding) frozen in death. And these directorial touches are true to the play's shock tactics. A quartet of lovers come to grief in The Broken Heart and inspire its complex, dangerous action. The scene is ostensibly ancient Sparta, though Boyd suitably stages it in late Elizabethan costumes, where marriages are fixed: Ithocles has put politics and money before love and instead of allowing his sister Penthea to marry the noble, Orgilus—her betrothed—has given her over to the old Lord Bassanes. But similar treatment is meted out to him when his own love, Princess Calantha, finds herself set up in marriage for a neighbouring prince.

Emma Fielding's magnificent, anorexic Penthea is a searing portrayal of female desperation. With pallid face, and in virgin-white dress, hair severely scraped back, she has the air of the determinedly hopeless.

In the presence of her jealous husband Bassanes whom Philip Voss, with his slightly Donald Sinden-ish voice makes a maestro of camp melodramatics, she displays weary contempt. But though she spits in the face of Robert Bowman's wracked Ithocles, the brother who has ruined her life, she accepts his passionate kiss on the lips. It is as though incestuous desire explains Ithocles's need to wreck Penthea's love-life.

Iain Glen as the object of Penthea's desire astutely identifies Orgilus as a man deranged, nursing his murderous schemes under a velvet cover of smiling affability. But there's no missing his rage and pain either—as his voice quavers, shakes and breaks under the strain. In fatal revenge he ranges from violence to gentleness, and ends up slithering in his own blood-bath.

It is a spectacular but truthful performance, brimming with sardonic humour and emotional dynamism. And these same qualities are apparent in the sinister finale when the marriage ceremony for Calantha (Olivia Williams) shades into the dance of death, which concludes this shockingly powerful production.