Thyestes, Arcola Theatre, London

The saying “revenge is a dish best served cold” takes on a horrid new tenor after a viewing of Thyestes . Seneca’s remorseless Roman tragedy, served up here in a riveting production by Polly Findlay and a taut translation by Caryl Churchill, tells of a particularly nasty episode in the history of the blood-soaked House of Atreus.

Here, the estranged brothers Thyestes and Atreus appear to be reconciled, but Atreus has an ulterior motive for the reunion. He wants revenge upon Thyestes, who cheated him out of wife and power. So he invites Thyestes to a feast and dishes up his young children, forcing the unwitting father to eat his own sons. It is a tactic quite as grisly as any video nasty might imagine and worse, in some ways, for being described rather than shown. The audience, like Thyestes, learn of the violence after the event and have to picture it themselves.

Not for the faint-hearted, then, and Findlay and her team plunge in with great invention. Hannah Clark’s set confines us in a lugubrious, underground archive, full of ancient filing cabinets, dusty shelves and dingy boxes: a place where every grudge is recorded, nothing ever forgotten. Christopher Shutt’s grinding soundtrack keeps up a distressing low-level hum. Findlay’s production opens with a brilliant coup de théâtre, as the Fury (Youssef Kerkour) plunges his hands into a water butt and pulls out a wriggling, sodden, gasping Tantalus: the grandfather of the two brothers. This grim rebirth marks the return of Tantalus from Hell to reignite the household’s bloody curse.

Jamie Ballard, who plays Tantalus, the starving ghost, also plays Thyestes, the sated father, bringing disturbing energy to both. His virtuoso display of revulsion when he realises what he has consumed is almost unwatchable. His guttural horror is vividly matched by Nick Fletcher’s smooth, understated Atreus, who plans his atrocities with the studied calm of a psychopath.

The production graphically conveys the bleak prospect of cycles of revenge. The walls appear to ooze blood; the lights gutter and go out. This is all suitably grim, though you do feel rather pulped by the end of it. Some variation in tone would be more powerful in places and there are passages when the energy drops. But this is a striking debut from the promising production company Darbourne Luff. ★★★☆☆