This is a two-fold return for director Michael Boyd. It marks his first work back on a Stratford stage since he retired from the artistic helm of the Royal Shakespeare Company six years ago, and for the occasion he revisits the Christopher Marlowe diptych which he directed in New York in 2014. This pair of plays are rarely if ever staged without serious trimming, and Boyd has pared them down to a very reasonable three hours of playing time (plus interval).

What may be surprising is that what have gone from this talky work are often the non-talky bits. Marlowe follows his version of 14^th-century Asian emperor Timur from his beginnings as a Scythian shepherd-turned-warlord to a despot who (in Boyd’s staging) has literally a wagonload of crowns, on which he travels pulled by some of the monarchs he has conquered. (In another Boydian return, the principal crown is apparently the same one used in his RSC staging of Shakespeare’s histories some 15 years ago.) In this version, however, we see no battles as such apart from a single sword-stroke in Part One. The violence is either stylised or excised altogether, with characters’ deaths being symbolised by their ritual daubing or splashing with stage gore – again literally, buckets of blood. The dead themselves become, collectively, a significant presence on stage at a succession of crucial moments.

With the action thus, we are called upon to tune in more unremittingly to the high-flown rhetoric, of a style more or less invented for Elizabethan drama by Marlowe in this work. Again surprisingly, this is comparatively easy; I’ve found it much harder to focus on some Shakespeare works than on this succession of oratorical clashes. The backbone of this clarity is Jude Owusu’s performance as Tamburlaine: he keeps the sense of Marlowe’s verse in the foreground, and even better, does so without sacrificing the metre. (At one point he pronounces “Pers-i-a” with three syllables to keep the iambic rhythm.) The likes of David Sturzaker, James Tucker, Rosy McEwen as Tamburlaine’s beloved (though abducted) Zenocrate and Mark Hadfield doing his trademark comic scene-stealing are also in the front rank of a large, solid cast; Hadfield’s presence also signals that Boyd cannily leavens much of the evening with humour, until the growing tide of grim fatalism in Part Two becomes unassailable.

What  is communicated (if we leave aside Marlowe’s possible “Mahomet”-baiting, which would require an essay in itself) is a sense of universal precariousness. The late Elizabethan age was racked not only with specific uncertainties about the succession of the throne, but more globally about the status of monarchy as an institution. If an entire political order can be overturned by one person possessed of both charisma and prodigious amounts of self-belief, one who is even prepared perfunctorily to kill his eldest son for being insufficiently martial, then what can we rely on? Well, we can evidently rely on Michael Boyd to make stage work that is both intelligent and nimble.

Written for the Financial Times.