The latest new piece to be presented in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s reactivated Other Place falls into the category of “honourable failure”. It’s unfortunate that this way of looking at work has gone out of fashion, although in the current case I’m slightly mystified as to why the attempt was made in the first place. It’s absurd to consider anything to be the last word on a given subject; however, as regards dramatic treatments of the historical moment of uncertainty and potential for radical ideas in England immediately after the Civil War of the 1640s, following Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining In Buckinghamshire (revived a couple of years ago at the National Theatre), Gemma Brockis and Wendy Hubbard here are effectively trying to reinvent the wheel.

Brockis, Hubbard and their half-dozen actors and co-devisers begin earlier than Churchill, with a reimagining of the final masque to be performed at the court of King Charles I. They treat its disintegration as kind of lead-in to the Civil War... which is, itself, squandered as a series of captions projected on to the stage. This production’s claim to originality is its promenade component; after the first half-hour we are walked into the venue’s scene dock for the king’s execution and a collage of “world turned upside down” scenes featuring the likes of a Leveller preacher (Lucy Ellinson briefly avoiding grievous underuse throughout the rest of the evening); however, the principal motivator is surely ordering us out of the theatre as an analogue of, well, the Puritan closure of the theatres.

As anachronistically as that ban appeared, we return to the theatre for the third and final phase, in which occasional scenes emerge from a series of to-me-inexplicable tableaux, and the tension between flux and mutability on the one hand, and increasing Puritan authoritarianism on the other, seems to be emblematised in the juxtaposition of a group of underground actors and the preparations for Cromwell’s butchering Irish expedition. In the end, the piece suffers from the besetting affliction of so much devised work: it begins with a nebulous vapour of ideas and/or images it would like to develop, but ends up simply enacting the nebula rather than coalescing it into theatrical matter.

Written for the Financial Times.