Punishment Without Revenge is a tragedy with no tragic hero where each character is human – there are no villains and monsters, heroes or gods. Our three protagonists – the Duke, the Count & Casandra are as flawed and consequently as sympathetic as real people. Lope de Vega was as great a humanist as Shakespeare and in Punishment without Revenge we see him at the height of both his literary powers and the powers of his heart.

Compassion is at the heart of this play – perhaps not in the hearts of the characters but in our apprehension and understanding of them. This makes the ending so tragic: as we cannot blame the 'villain' of the piece but rather the strictures of an honour bound society. Indeed it is no coincidence that it features more soliloquy than any of Lope de Vega's other works – providing each character the opportunity to elicit sympathy and empathy from the audience. This is a world of intense feeling – a vivid, colourful, passionate world. As in Shakespeare, where an Athenian court is really a cipher for Elizabethan England, so too the Italian setting in Punishment Without Revenge is a thinly veiled disguise for a world of seventeenth century Spain, a world of Spanish passions or 'duende'. Of course our production must also speak to a contemporary British audience – our liberalism and tolerance must be accommodated in world of formal codes and honour and vice versa.

This play is very much a product of a seventeenth century moral code yet it is strikingly contemporary in its refusal to condemn or vilify the flawed and deeply human protagonists. This humanity speaks to a modern world and yet the world of the play cannot simply be updated or we lose the context that makes possible the acceptability of honour killings. For the play to live in our time any production must both acknowledge the world it comes from and the world we now inhabit – the trick is to keep a foot in both worlds.

Our production must then create its own theatrical reality – blending the colour and passion of seventeenth century Spain with that of contemporary Southwark in an exotic and eclectic celebration of both their similarities and their differences. This is a heightened world where the colours are a little too bright, the music a little too loud, a place where we love a little too deeply and the blood pumping through our veins is a little too red. This is a world of vibrant colour but also fluidity – scenes change in an instant from a courtyard to a forest to a palace and consequently the playing space will need to accommodate this fluidity with an abstract and minimal design. The constant allusion to mirrors in the text may be picked up in the aesthetic for, like Hamlet, this play also holds a mirror up to nature.

It will be the costume and the sound-world then that will truly evoke the atmosphere of this world. Two of the cast will be actor-musicians – their percussive underscoring providing the increasingly erratic heartbeat of the play – charting the loss of control of Casandra & the count, and their giving themselves up to the force of a love seemingly beyond their power.

Like many of Lope's works the play is shot through with meta-theatricality – characters drawing the audiences' attention to the conscious style/use of language and even the choice of one word over another in order to complete a rhyme! This is the opposite of a Brechtian meta-theatricality, for where the latter uses such devices to distance and alienate the audience in Lope de Vega, as in Shakespeare, it invites the audience into the joke and makes them complicit in the act of story-telling. Such is the strength of the characters that despite such self-conscious theatricality we become more involved in their stories and not less so. We might explore this further in our production and acknowledge the casting (and cross-casting) of roles at the opening of the play, and possibly replace actors with puppets in some scenes both to reinforce the theatricality of the storytelling and also to point up the seeming loss of control the characters have over their own actions and lives.