IT IS a play full of bloody murder, lust, evil intent and corruption.

Certainly, the Jacobean tragedy The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, piles on the drama.

And it is given a fairly reasonable interpretation by the English Touring Theatre company at the Liverpool Playhouse.

Here is the bleak, grey set against which such wicked events can occur, a cast in full period dress and a bit of ominous music to underline some of the more spine-chilling moments.

But – and it is quite a big but – the production lacks the dark atmosphere needed to pull off the real nastiness of the story.

Sometimes that set is too brightly lit, there is not always enough underpinning music and it is often too clean-cut, too straightforward and far too refined.

It is the tale of a woman, Beatrice, who gets her disfigured servant to murder her fiance simply because she has fallen in love with another.

Then the servant demands his wicked way with her in recompense.

A finger is cut off a dead body to obtain a ring, curious concoctions are taken to prove virginity and, in a parallel story, two men pretend to be mad in order to seduce the wife of an asylum doctor.

In the central role of Beatrice, newcomer Anna Koval has an interesting face and an ability to deliver a line at full force, but one never quite believes in her evil. For “a woman dipped in blood”, she is strangely anaemic.

Her lovelorn and murderous servant Deflores is played by Adrian Schiller in an odd, oily monotone that eventually becomes rather ponderous while Gideon Turner’s Alsemro, the subject of Beatrice’s love interest, is just a little bland.

Making rather more of their roles are Ken Bones as a vigorous father to Beatrice, David Cardy as a whip-cracking worker in the asylum, and Terrence Hardiman’s shock-haired asylum doctor.

Director Stephen Unwin tells his tale well enough and there are a few well-considered ideas, like the Frankenstein castle-like asylum scenes. It’s just a shame he could not make it more brutal.