Has Cambridge’s legendary Marlowe Society gone into decline?  Their Complete Works season, beginning last autumn with a much-hyped Dido, now seems to have lost its momentum, as this unimpressive May Week production of The Jew of Malta made clear. 

It was performed directly beneath the window of Marlowe’s old chamber in Corpus Christi College, with the actors still clutching their scripts. I suspect that if Elizabethan theatre’s enfant terrible had witnessed what was being performed in his name, he’d have wanted that name removed from the programme. If there had even been a programme. 

There was, admittedly, a very stylish poster festooning the railings of Cambridge’s churches, advertising this as a “chamber production”. To me this suggests an edited text, intimately performed. We certainly had the former – swathes of Marlowe’s mighty lines were cut - but as for intimacy… well, with just one exception, the cast of four kept as far away from the audience as possible, and was largely inaudible.

To his credit, Eliot Cohen’s intelligent, lively and well-enunciated Barabas – while rather too reminiscent of an arm-waving, hyperactive Matt Smith – was the exception in a cast otherwise out of its depth.

Instead of seeing the play as it was published in 1633, we had selected scenes from the heinous career of Barabas, the Jew with a grudge who gleefully mass-murders his way through Malta’s population, including assorted monks and nuns, his own daughter (Emily Atkinson) along with his slave and one-time sidekick Ithamore (Max Carpenter).

Bizarrely, none of Barabas’s fantastical murders were actually acted out – they were more, well, implied. The only dramatically memorable moment was Barabas’s death itself, smothered in a doubtless symbolic red sheet. (The script has him thrust into a blazing cauldron). Add to this some newly-written interludes in which Barabas and the Prologue (Tom Collingwood) discussed  the Jew’s crimes in scenes reminiscent of It’s a Wonderful Life, and it’s clear that Arif Khan’s direction went wildly astray. 

I’d never seen 'The Jew of Malta' before.  I still haven’t.