TODAY we munch on the television junk food of Big Brother. In Jacobean times, audiences feasted on the big bother of revenge tragedies, brutal and bloody, but never brief.

John Webster was the tabloid hack of the Renaissance drama pack: he had a legal training and is often charged with the "crime" of wishing to give his audience a cheap thrill through grotesque effects and sensational storylines.

In 2004, his gruesome tale of a powerful family riven by greed, suspicion, perversion and lies would be the stuff of television soap opera or a Tarantino or Scorsese movie, but T S Eliot saw something higher in Webster's liquorice-dark dramas. "He was much possessed by death and saw the skull beneath the skin," he wrote.

Plenty then to tantalise the macabre taste buds of Apricot Theatre, a young professional company of University of York students on its first national tour, and Mark Edel-Hunt's cast of six literally laps up the blood (from a bucket) as the body count rises.

The Malfi programme comes with a mission statement, on the one hand a risk if a company does not match its ideal, on the other an indication of impressively lofty ambitions. Good news, Apricot Theatre bears the ripest of fruits in the fruitiest of productions.

"We hold that the best performances are those that are not scared to expose themselves as exactly what they are: pieces of make-believe," says Apricot, a company that seeks to ally "eloquent, reasoned and intelligent understanding of a play text with the visually-compelling visual impact of devised and physical techniques".

Translated on to the black-box stage of the Stagecoach Studio Theatre, and performed against a backdrop redolent of a Dutch master's oil painting, The Duchess Of Malfi receives a vigorous treatment from Apricot, whose players take delight in cross-fertilising the sinister comedy of Victorian music hall with the traditions of Jacobean horror stories and the earlier conventions of Mummers' Plays. They cake their faces in voodoo/clown white, they slap on make-up like The Cure's Robert Smith; they use masks, mannequins and puppetry (particularly chilling), intercut with deliberately disruptive interludes of spooked madrigals in the manner of Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch's junk opera Shockheaded Peter.

The piece de resistance, in a story already high on sexual tension, religious hypocrisy and female victims, is Edel-Hunt's risqu use of cross-gender casting: be it a man playing a woman caught in flagrante with a woman playing a cardinal or the outstanding, RADA-bound Edel-Hunt himself in the role of the maid. Keep an eye on him; Malfi affirms he is bloody talented.

Apricot Theatre presents The Duchess Of Malfi at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, August 10 to 30, noon, at C Venues, Chambers Street, Edinburgh. Box office: 0870 701 5105.

Box office: 01904 674675.

Updated: 10:03 Thursday, July 15, 2004