A producer can do a lot for a play, but they can’t buy good timing. With the armed forces returning from Libya, the clean-up of the destruction caused by their exquisitely destructive weaponry underway, now is the time for this modern retelling a Greek tragedy, one where the emotional and political debris from an unnamed war in Africa must be swept away. Cruel and Tender, the 2004 play by Martin Crimp, one of British theatre’s finest word-smiths, is a well-executed piece brimming with tension, unease and a sense of relevance just bubbling under the audience’s immediate comprehension.

The play is a take on Sophocles’ Women of Trachis in which the epic wars of Heracles are replaced by the War on Terror, a war fought to “purify” and “destroy” evil, the religious zeal of the Bush years not far removed from the god-driven combat of ancient times. Amelia (Megan Roberts) waits for her husband, the unnamed General (Lawrence Bowles) to return, and grows jealous, dealing with his and her own infidelity ever more erratically until she finally commits an unforgiveable crime. The interference of sexual politics with military politics is central to the play, as the General’s submergement in violence has led him to a terrible sexual perversity. As one character puts it, men “liberate, by which they mean fuck, women.”

Roberts’ performance is the centrepiece of the play, and she is a captivating watch; cold, vulnerable, distraught and despite the rapid-fire, acidic density of the dialogue, somehow also believable. Her announcement of the near-death of another character with the good news that they are now safe and eating yoghurt was somehow both chilling and moving, and yet also very unnerving.

In fact the whole atmosphere of the play was unnerving. Far from the all-out gush of Greek tragic emotions, there was just something not right about the clipped, often underplayed exchanges. The chorus, here a blankly whinnying trio of beauticians (Kesia Guillery, Matilda Wnek, Ailis Creavin), gave a horrifically unmoved reaction to the unfolding tragedy, while the lighting and set design gave a permeable, minimalist, insubstantial sheen to the whole affair. And the addition of HIV and the clinical horror of chemical warfare to the poetic descriptions of suffering so beloved of Greek tragedy is a touch that removes any romance there might have been in these formerly legendary figures. The simple image of subtly mad Bowles urinating calmly into a catheter, rambling about his Herculean deeds, before being sent to answer for “war crimes”, seems to both bridge and widen the gap between us and our Greek ancestors.

This play has a lot of ideas in it, not all readily available to the audience, and is a tough watch. But Chloe Mashiter’s production pulls it all off through a strong cast a and a dedication to the seriousness of the material, focussed on the question of guilt for the crimes of man - to take a wonderful phrase from the play, is it “sex or rocket-propelled grenades”?