Here’s just the thing for the first week of the Festival: a rousing tale of incest, seduction and mutilation. They relished this sort of thing on the Jacobean stage – there being no Jeremy Kyle back then. But Declan Donnellan’s production is no sleazy sex-and-gore fest but has plenty of digs at the suffocating atmosphere of the Catholic Church.

Cheek By Jowl is renowned for radical interpretations of the classics and Donnellan gives this the full treatment. The text is taken at a rapid pace, with no interval, aided by many cuts. I’m not sure the modern updating works. The play relies on the closed world of Italian nobility and the Catholic obsession with sex – the contemporary setting adds nothing.

Eve Ponsonby is excellent as the doomed Annabella, effortlessly shifting from innocent teenager to expectant mother, whose pregnancy gives her away. There’s good work too from Orlando James’s Giovanni (although he looks a bit too well-toned for someone described as sickly), Maximilien Seweryn’s mercurial Soranzo and Nicola Sanderson’s gossipy maid.

The best performance is Will Alexander’s Vasques, a smoothly plausible thug, his easy charm hiding a malevolent core. And it’s good to see a homecoming for Brighton actor David Collings as the aggrieved father, Florio.

I’ve seen better Cheek By Jowl productions, but this fast-paced show still packs a punch.