Relative values: Venice Preserved - Royal Exchange

Presumably the Royal Exchange did not decide to revive Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved only because the first night could fall on the anniversary of the author's birth, 342 years ago. They must believe in the play and in their principle of inspecting neglected work. Hence the curiosity of this Restoration tragedy, a work which has one foot in the teeming pool of Elizabethan and Jacobean volubility and cynicism, and the other on the drier ground of neo-classical action and Roman high-mindedness.

Gregory Hersov's production takes the play on its own, text-centred terms rather than distracting us with coups of design or business.

The plot centres upon Jaffeir who has secretly married Belvidera only to incur scorn and persecution from her father Priuli: 'get brats and starve' is his less than paternal blessing. Facing complete ruin, the embittered Jaffeir is persuaded by his friend Pierre to join a conspiracy against the Venetian state. His crisis comes when the horrified Belvidera says he must choose between her and betraying the plotters and his friend.

The play's political clash is between rhetorics, both imposing but equally vacuous and destructive. The grandees speak a language of arrogant orotundity which David Gant's Priuli takes to the very edge of self-parody. The conspirators declaim in favour of 'full liberty' and the purifying effects of sanguinary violence. Jaffeir is infected with this despite the entirely opposite sentiments of his devotion to his wife. The self-consciousness of Otway's preoccupation with rhetoric is underscored by the verbal antics of the comic senator Antonio. He is forever threatening to speechify but is happiest with the besotted, nonsensical babble he addresses to the courtesan Aquilina (Diana Kent) as he begs her to abuse him. David Ryall's performance in a role heavily pregnant with embarrassment is very skilful.

In the earlier scenes Jaffeir and Belvidera's love provides the production's most convincing moments. Helen McCrory combines a vocal power well able to ride the demanding, if rarely distinguished, breakers of Otway's long verse paragraphs, with a restless, nervous presence. Jonathan Cullen's physical delicacy is also most comfortable in these scenes.

The play's unresolved problem lies in the crucial relations between Jaffeir and Pierre. Hersov and his designer David Short have updated the setting to the late 19th century. This works both to evoke the gilded-age opulence of the 'truly solid senators' and lend the conspirators the aura of romantic revolutionaries. The sardonic critic Pierre is also the fervent idealist, and, in George Anton's portrayal, cloak cast across his shoulder, he looks as though he's perpetually posing for Rodin. Against this, Cullen's Jaffeir, afflicted with the worst of the wigs, looks less like Bukharin than Gilbert & Sullivan's Bunthorne. The power, even the superiority of their relationship is insisted on but never credibly demonstrated. Thus it is not clear whether the play is being read entirely ironically, pointing to the casual destruction of the feminine realm by a Venice not worth preserving whoever rules it, or whether it has some investment in the high Roman fashion of this masculine bond.

With big voices everywhere, Hersov's production does not shrink from the play's melodramatic extravagance. Unfortunately it is a largely superficial one. Disinterred, Venice Preserved is an empty shroud.

Royal Exchange, Manchester (061-833 9833) to 2 April