The mask of command

Though written in 1626, The Roman Actor, at London's Gielgud Theatre, offers startlingly modern views on power and acting, says Rhoda Koenig

An actor who carries on like Rumpelstiltskin on speed, Antony Sher may get on some theatregoers' nerves, but even they (well, I) would reckon that he's just the ticket for a demented Roman emperor. In Philip Massinger's 1626 play The Roman Actor, Sher's Domitian enters atop a column, arms up, palms forward, staring with unholy glee. When he meets his end, he resumes his iconic pose, this time covered in blood. In between, he laughs mirthlessly, swivels his eyes and condemns the innocent to agonising death with the air of a man who has to do something to fill his day. So, a good time is had by all.

The Roman Actor, though, is much more than a chance for Mr Busy-Busy-Busy to be well cast. The standout in the Royal Shakespeare Company's season of rarities, it's astonishingly ahead of its time, politically and aesthetically. To me, Massinger was just the New Way to Pay Old Debts chap, but this play, his favourite, belongs to the age of Enlightenment and to that of Pirandello. The Roman senators frankly discuss their misgivings about Domitian, saying that, while his father signed an order of execution ruefully, he gets a kick out of doing it. The final speech is delivered by an actor who points at the audience and declares that, just as the wicked emperor was rightly assassinated by the people he exploited, tyrants must ever expect their subjects to rise against them.

Along with the idea that power resides with the people, whom their leader serves, the play explores the theme of acting and reality. From its first scene, the vigour of the action is contrasted with the creepy ambiguity of scripts and masks, deception and disguise. When a man is playing another's part, it says, does he put aside his identity? Or, at such a moment, is he most himself?

The question attains a certain urgency when Domitian asks the actors to indulge his whim and let him play a role. The one he chooses is that of a murderer, and his victim, according to the script, is played by Paris, whom Domitian has caught in bed with his empress. In a lighter vein, the play shows the consternation of naive spectators who fear that a dramatised robbery or hanging is real. How they must have laughed in the 17th century at those Roman yokels.

Sean Holmes's forceful production moves briskly through this fascinating story, its fulcrum being Joe Dixon as Paris. Bronzed and oiled, bold in his craft but wary in his relations (until temptation proves his undoing) with his unstable Caesar, Dixon brims with vitality and humanity. No one else here has such a showy part as he and Sher, but some of the actors could put a bit more zip in theirs. Keith Osborn is terribly phlegmatic when the emperor steals his wife and has his flesh torn to bits, and Anna Madeley, as the wife, speaks – as do all the women – in a rather shallow, tinny voice. And, though pretty, she walks like a truck driver in loose shoes, not an uncommon failing at the RSC. Can't they get these girls to move in a way that's feminine and ladylike? Or are those qualities considered politically incorrect?

At the Gielgud Theatre, London W1 (0870 890 1105) to 24 January