It begins with courtiers in white face pancake plucking violins, but the highly entertaining and visually rich Red Bull Theatre production of Thomas Middleton's little-seen Women Beware Women, currently performing at Theatre at St. Clements, quickly and excitingly proves to have contemporary blood in its veins. Under Jesse Berger's deft direction, the social satire in Middleton's Jacobean comic tragedy is immediately made accessible for modern audiences.

Status, beauty, and the appearance of propriety: these are the highly valued commodities that set the characters against each other, first comically and then tragically. When the beautiful Bianca (Jennifer Ikeda), recently wed to the clerk [...]