This is a Thyestes story not merely acted in a theatre but set in a theatre. In an ingenious twist, it is not Seneca's characters who plot revenge and stage gruesome murders, but Cambridge's student actors.

The ADC's backstage is brought forward a few meters so that chairs, costume rail and the stage manager's desk frame the performance area, a stage marked out in white tape. We are privy to the backstage conversations and gossip of the cast, and it emerges that the director and stage manager have had enough of Tom [Powell], playing Thyestes.

In a fast-paced opening scene Jamie Hansen (director) and Stephen Bermingham (stage manager/Atreus) toss aside the psychological, moral and legal arguments against murder and develop their plot to destroy Tom. Though the stage manager is initially unimpressed with the director's revenge plan, he quickly becomes a willing and methodical murderer, and mysteriously knows all of Atreus's lines so that he is able to take over the role of Tom's brother. Familiarity with the original play, or a classics student to sit next to, is helpful as they obliquely hint that Tom shall suffer the torment of Thyestes at the hands of Atreus.

The play flits between the opening night of Seneca's Thyestes and the antics of the cast and crew backstage. Perhaps to emphasize the demarcation of on-stage and off-stage personas, half the cast inexplicably became bad actors when they cross the white line onto the stage. The girls of the chorus, Ailis Creavin, Juliet Cameron-Wilson and Georgia Ingles, play overly-theatrical fledgling actresses, tossing their hair and flouncing off stage after their speeches. The over-acting might be a nod to the extremity and excess of Seneca's text, but it makes an obscure play even harder to follow as the scene setting and lyrical evocation normally offered by the chorus are lost in a rush of dramatic declaiming. It is also confusingly inconsistent, with Tom Powell's Thyestes giving a seemingly straight speech explaining the state of his relations with his brother while his children, Harry Sheehan and Katherine Soper, comically mime their innocence with slow blinking, upturned faces behind his back.

Mapping the Greek tragedy onto the cast's lives is clever and original, but unsatisfyingly incomplete. The director and stage manager's motivation for murder is somewhat hazy: rather than being the next affront in a gory chain of familial bloodshed down the house of Atreus, the murders of Sheehan and Soper seem a slightly unrelated reaction to Tom's having has slept with the stage manager's girlfriend. The infidelity is reminiscent of the mythical adultery of Thyestes with Atreus' wife Aerope, but it is not a readily available connection. Tom's gruesome fate of unknowingly eating his fellow cast members' flesh is similarly not quite Thyestes' horror of having eaten his own murdered children, and is an absurd ending rather than a tragic culmination. Though it is hard to follow at times, Phil Howe and Rachel Cunliffe's adaptation is inventive and full of perverse humour, and is a novel way of staging Seneca.

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