Set during the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution, Glyn Maxwell’s new verse drama indisputably has historical interest on its side. And it raises moral, political and social questions that have forceful contemporary resonance. But where, in Maxwell’s writing or in Guy Retallack’s ponderous production, is the thrilling theatre? The guillotine’s blade is blunted by verbosity in a play that is, dramatically, all gristle and no meat.

Liberty is based on the 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif by Anatole France, who, along with Zola and others, was involved in the infamous Dreyfus affair. His intervention in that case implies a passion for justice evidenced in his book’s concern with the bloody price paid for revolution. The escalating Terror brings with it paranoia and hysteria, leading to the imposition of tyrannical laws by which conviction is permissible without proof and an inflexible notion of patriotic virtue trumps reason.

Yet ironically, while Maxwell emphasises the way in which extremism denies humanity, he fails to humanise ideas. His characters are so thin that it’s hard to care what becomes of them. Chief among them is Evariste Gamelin, a struggling painter and political zealot propelled on to a revolutionary tribunal, where he wields the power of life and death. Personal allegiances fall away in a state drunk on idealism and galvanised by fear; terror becomes a matter of policy to protect the precarious new order.

Gamelin is strongly emblematic of Robespierre; but that can’t compensate for the fact that Maxwell has neglected to furnish the character with much personality of his own. As played by David Sturzaker, he is colourless, barely offering a glimpse of the psychological process by which idealistic conviction becomes dogmatic tyranny. His relationship with Ellie Piercy’s sweet embroidress Elodie becomes distorted, he exercising a domestic reign of terror at home in tandem with his activities in public life. But their love affair merely feels like a schematic convenience.

There’s some enlivening relief from the supporting cast, notably John Bett as a discredited former duke, an engaging Edward Macliam as Gamelin’s old friend Philippe Demay and Kirsty Besterman as Rose Clebert, a sharp-minded actress.

But a recurrent motif equating Gamelin’s speechifying to Rose’s theatrical activities is irksomely overworked, and, for all its relevance to today’s issues of state-sponsored terrorism and fundamentalist violence, Liberty never comes to life. Punishing.

Box office: 020-7401 9919, to October 4, then touring to November 15 2008 (www.shakespeares-globe.org)

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