Edward II at the National Theatre

Christopher Marlowe’s last play goaded Shakespeare to respond with the more frequently performed Richard II. But Marlowe’s magnificent chronicle of an acclaimed and then imprisoned monarch, and his favoured catamite, Piers Gaveston, can still seem a strikingly modern and controversial play.

Joe Hill-Gibbins’s production is part of the Travelex £12 ticket scheme in the Olivier auditorium, and is unlikely to stint on homoerotic tension, brutality among the barons and the red hot poker murder scene (“I fear me that this cry will raise the town”).

Edward made Ian McKellen an overnight star 43 years ago and the same could happen to young John Heffernan, who has already emerged as a distinctive classicist; his Gaveston is another brilliant actor, Kyle Soller, and Vanessa Kirby plays marital gooseberry as Queen Isabella.

Hill-Gibbins tore up the rule book in his sex-and-jelly sensational production of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling at the Young Vic, and it’s high time that Marlowe’s play is restored, if not as a handbook of morality in the monarchy, then as a pulsating parable of corruption in the country.

Edward II is showing at the National Theatre until 26th October