A Warwick theatre is set to showcase a play rarely seen in over 400 years

The Massacre at Paris, by Christopher Marlowe, is taking centre stage at Warwick's Playbox Theatre this October.

Leading the cast is Conor Davis as Guise, Gracie Tomlin as Catherine De Medici, Lucy Quirk as Henry of Navarre and Hayden James Mulcock as Anjou, with an ensemble of 25 actors.

Director Stewart McGill, who spoke to the Podcast Beyond Shakespeare about the production, shared: "Some call this play a wreckage. I rather feel it is a live wire.

"Marlowe was killed soon after unleashing his beast, and I wanted to re-explore what the play had to say about those dangerous days after the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. No museum piece, it has been created as a live show, without being literal. Tribes, faith, power. A cost of belonging. It's a thrilling and bloody spectacle.

"I suppose it's designed for audiences who want a raw theatre event and who might like to be in the room when the play comes back. It's a show!''

The play details

In 1592, just twenty years after the streets of Paris ran with the blood of Protestants on St Bartholomew's Day, Marlowe wrote a play that was too dangerous to print whole. Only actors' mangled memories and audiences' varying recollections survive. Perhaps this is why our major companies have left it alone.

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The ensemble of 25 young actors at Playbox Theatre has rebuilt Massacre as a raw theatre event for now.

PARIS 1572

A wedding is staged to, superficially, end a religious war – Catholic Princess Margaret to Protestant Henry Navarre. It's a picture frame piece. A bell rings and a massacre begins that will consume a nation.

Playbox Theatre decided that the show was not to be a heritage revival. Rather, the world would be created anew. Reflections on industrial images, audience close-up, the mechanics of slaughter. Drawing on European artistic genres, the company wondered what the Elizabethan audiences may have felt watching living history re-enacted. Danger? Fear? What did first audiences feel?

This experimental approach has been developed using all the theatre has of Marlowe's text. Elizabethan turbo meets industrial circus.

Tickets cost from £10, and the show will run on 15, 16 and 17 October from 7 pm.