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For years after the opening of the concrete mausoleum on the South Bank of the Thames, otherwise known as the Royal National Theatre, it didn't know who it was or what it was for. It had (for the 1970s) state of the art technology which nobody seemed to be able to work and a fuzzy mission which nobody really understood. But look at it now. Just this month alone, it's tackling O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, Jacobean tragedy, an 18th century comedy, Bulgakov's Russian family saga, and at least one cutting-edge contemporary play.

	London's National Theatre

The building may be ugly (what am I saying? the building is ugly even with the current refit to make it possible for the uninitiated to find the entrance without a map) but the setting is lovely — the River Thames flows outside the theatre. Downriver is the Tower of London and St. Paul's, upriver the bright lights and modern buildings of contemporary London. So if you get bored with the play you can go to one of the capacious terraces and watch the boats. There are bars and restaurants and a different music group playing every evening just before the plays begin in the three theatres.

Just being in the National on an average night is a kick. The other evening I asked a woman sitting in the lobby with a glass of wine which play she was seeing and she replied, "Oh, none of them. I often come here after work to have a drink and listen to the music. It's so lively and fun and I get to find out about the plays from people like you. So," she continued, "what should I see next?"

She should certainly see Marianne Elliott's new production of Thomas Middleton's 1622 Jacobean drama, Women Beware Women, running to July 4 at the National's Olivier Theatre. Manipulation is the tool, power is the end, sex is the currency. In fact, they're all in there just waiting to be exercised by people who think the rules don't apply to them. Think television stars, professional golfers, politicians, and my personal favorites, bankers. Greed and sex, the twin preoccupations of our celebrity culture, turn out not to be of our generation at all but the equal currency of all those who have gone before.

	Lauren O'Neil and Samuel Barnett in Women Beware Women
	photo by Simon Annand

Middleton based Women Beware Women, dangerously closely on the scandal of Archduke Francesco di Medici of Florence, whose wife mysteriously got suddenly dead, at which point he immediately married his mistress, Bianca Capello, in the most lavish wedding ever seen in Florence, whereupon she was accused of being both witch and murderess. This is Middleton's plot, adding for good measure three more relationships — one between a young girl and her uncle, one between a manipulative widow and a newly married man, and one between that man's wife (bravely named Bianca too) and the Duke.

All are arranged by the rich widow, Harriet Walter (she was Tony nominated last year for Mary Stuart) as the most perfect villainess — you almost expect her to hiss and twirl mustachios at the audience — who, with her assistants, organizes first the alliances and then the downfall of every one of them, including eventually herself. The toffs (for which read footballers, golfers, politicians, and, yes, bankers) trumpet their entitlement to anything they want, whether it's a girl or a palace.

Director Elliott has cleverly set the play in the 1950s, a time when class was breaking down and nobody "knew their place" any more, thus giving the lower orders a taste of the possibilities that might be available to them if they could just vault the class divide. She finds humor in gesture as well as lines and in this play that's a major achievement because, let's face it, Thomas Middleton is hardly Oscar Wilde in the wit department.

The final scene, when, in true Jacobean style, everybody murders everybody else, works brilliantly as the problem of unlikely multiple murders by all too likely murderers is here solved by being folded into a macabre ballet with the Olivier Theatre's enormous turntable revolving overtime to expose yet more bloody death. The technology works!! A rollicking, if gory, evening and another triumph for the National.