Potty-mouthed Queen’s a match for a nasty spy chief

CONSTITUTIONAL threats from Europe; religious fanatics martyring themselves. No, Anders Lustgarten’s brilliant play at The Globe is not set in Britain today, but Merrie England under Elizabeth I. Similarities are, however, entirely intentional.

Tara Fitzgerald is delicious as a potty-mouthed Elizabeth I, but the play is really about Aidan McArdle’s Sir Francis Walsingham: her scheming puritan spymaster who is also a clandestine empire builder.

He orchestrates a reign of terror, sustained by stoking conspiracy theories about Catholic plots.

Speaking of plots, Lustgarten’s is as byzantine as Walsingham’s schemes of bluff and counter bluff. But you get the gist. Supervising earls, drunks and cronies, he has great fun drawing parallels with our surveillance society today.

The parallels are, of course, imperfect, with Brexit bulldog David Davis forbidden from stretching Michel Barnier’s agents on the rack (except possibly in his dreams).

Matthew Dunster’s bitterly funny, sinister production is assisted by murky candlelight and Hitchcockian violins. But this is very much the McArdle show, as he moves through the gluey darkness towards a sticky end . . . hoist with his own petard, as Shakespeare might have said.