Tis Pity She's a Whore, Cheek by Jowl, Barbican, review How do you cut to the bleeding heart of John Ford's incestuous c1629 shocker - one of the late stragglers of the Jacobean gore-fest era? This twisted tale of unbridled sibling passion could be the stuff of Jeremy Kyle or Jerry Springer, but it could also seem simply sensational, lacking an emotional channel to switch into. Declan Donnellan's bold-as-brass solution for this Cheek by Jowl revival is to dare the audience not to believe a word of it. He bathes the action in an hallucinogenic glow. When the mainly modern-dressed company first converge on stage, executing deadpan disco moves to a thudding beat, it's as if they're spirited into life by Lydia Wilson's Annabella who, with her slim, trim physique and boyish bob, puts one in mind of Audrey Tautou as Amelie - and whose crimson lair, lined with arty film posters and dominated by a double bed, suggests a cocooned world in which imagination and taboo desire have been allowed to run feverish riot. The action is fleet-of-foot and fluid - at once filmic and highly theatrical: it's not just that scenes trip into each other but characters only referred to step directly into view as though what was in the mind's eye was instantly tangible. The evening, which races by in two hours without interval, has a highly charged, compressed quality. Sometimes that compression speaks volumes: when Wilson joins Jack Gordon's God-spurning Giovanni in the sack, the duo scrabbling swiftly to their undies - the ensemble chorus a Latin "Corpus Christi" prayer and lay a sheet over their humping bodies like a shroud; this foreshadows the doomy denouement and also underlines the play's sacrilegious insinuation that it's the Church, and its fixation with purity, that has stoked the pair's urge to keep it in the family. There are moments, though, especially during the hectic set-up phase, when less of this modishness would be more. With enough gyrating bodies and bared torsos to stock a Gay Pride parade, Donnellan risks swamping the clear-minded delivery of the verse with hedonistic excess and even plain silliness: the siblings" irritating resort to sock-puppets being the worst offender. You do feel for the victims here, both brother and sister and those they damage - above all Jack Hawkins" deceived Soranzo and his jilted mistress, Suzanne Burden's Hippolita - but only just. Maybe that's the discombobulating point, but even so Donnellan could afford to let us longer savour their agonies and drop some of the more funny-peculiar business. Until Mar 10.