A Jacobean doctor’s wife is accused of adultery with a neighbour, and sues the slanderer in the ecclesiastical court. They are innocent... strictly speaking; however, they feel love for one another and had taken steps to consummate it (remember, back in the 1970s, former president Jimmy Carter’s too-honest confession to having committed adultery “in his heart”?). Without any explicit word ever being said, husband, wife and “co-respondent” all know that they must at best equivocate and possibly lie before God, and certainly before the devious Vicar General.

Peter Whelan’s 1996 musings upon truth, religion, sex and gender (for Susanna is an intelligent and independent woman who among other things practises her husband’s herbal chemistry in his absence) are complex and delicate – too delicate, I fear, to wield much dramatic power but for one fact on which the fiction is founded: Susanna Hall’s maiden name was Shakespeare, and she really did bring a suit of defamation in 1613. References to her father’s illness are laced through the proceedings, and the evening ends with his offstage arrival in the Hall household for treatment. It is as if truth is coming home, even while Susanna states, “He was a liar too”: to the Puritan mentality struggling to dominate the Church of England at the time, playwriting is dissembling is lying.

James Dacre’s revival ends its two-month tour at co-producer the Rose in Kingston. Interestingly, this playhouse modelled on the Elizabethan configuration may expose the play’s and production’s weaknesses. I suspect it might seem more effective on a conventional proscenium-arch stage; on this broad, shallow thrust stage scarcely raised from auditorium level (and with some groundlings sitting on the floor in front of the formal seating), it feels more physically intimate but this in turn reveals the failings in emotional connection. There are no obvious shortcomings in performance, least of all from Emma Lowndes as Susanna; it’s just that the requisite notes aren’t hit resoundingly enough. The notable exception is the trial scene, with Michael Mears as the Vicar General goading everyone else to a high nervous pitch. It offers food for thought, certainly, but ironically it fails to seduce one into the right frame of mind.

Written for the Financial Times.