David Tennant’s post-Doctor Who stage roles have still tended towards the likeable (even his Hamlet was at times endearingly jack-the-laddish), whereas onscreen he has been darker and sometimes (as in the superhero TV series Jessica Jones) downright evil. He finds an ideal blend in Patrick Marber’s 2006 update (itself updated with references to Trump and the like) of the legendary libertine. As a no-longer-young aristo who can’t keep it in his trousers, he rollicks with all his characteristic appeal whilst at the same time candidly scorning any moral conventions (at one point offering a devout beggar his valuable watch if the man will blaspheme). By my count, he gets through eight women in less than two hours’ playing time, before finally facing judgement.

Either Marber’s rewrites have tightened the play’s own moral commentary, or it plays more keenly in the world of 2017 than it did even a decade ago. After the interval DJ (as he’s no longer effortfully called) has a speech in which he argues that social and political venality and wickedness justify personal amorality; the conclusion is no more persuasive, but the base material seems so much more fecund.

Marber is now also an astute, detailed director: his production here blends (in Anna Fleischle’s design) the modern and classical, and includes references to the best-known version of the tale, Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, not only by alternating snatches from it with the likes of Roxy Music and Talking Heads between scenes, but also punctuating the action with appearances of a masked chorus as if preparing to drag DJ down to hell on the orders of the statue... which, in this version, is not that of a former victim’s father but the likeness of Charles II in Soho Square. The district’s past as a hunting ground is evoked by the Don’s repeated lecherous huntsman’s cries of “So-HO!”

No other character comes close to proper dramatic substance, with the sole exception of the ever-excellent Adrian Scarborough as the Don’s servant Stan, ever morally vacillating: the flesh is willing but the spirit weak. Gawn Grainger doesn’t have much ammo but looses it off expertly as DJ’s father, Earl Louis. Marber’s revival may not go as deep as some might wish, but it certainly cuts sharp.

Written for the Financial Times.