A gripping revival of Edward's Bond's 1981 Royal Court success Restoration by Headlong Theatre Company - previously known as the Oxford Stage Company - is packing in audiences at the Playhouse this week.

Rupert Goold's lucid and extremely well-acted production marks a return to a style of political theatre that has not found favour over the past two decades.

It represents, too, a brave - and on the whole very successful - attempt to stir renewed interest in a fine and prolific playwright whose work deserves to be seen more often than it is.

Set in the 17th century, the play is, in part, a clever parody of what has come to be known as Restoration Comedy - all foppish wigs, devious schemes and sparkling repartee. But it is more.

In notes made as he began writing it Bond said: "Restoration Comedy shows the foolishness of its clowns. It doesn't show their viciousness. I have to show it."

And show it he does - in the odious character of the posturing, preening, utterly amoral aristocrat Lord Are, who is superbly portrayed in this production by Mark Lockyer. Blessed with a title but little money, he contracts a loveless marriage to the distinctly common daughter of a bluff Northern commercial magnate (Robert East).

The ghastly Ann (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) entertains high hopes of Are's early demise and long years of fashionable widowhood, but is quickly robbed of these when he accidentally kills her.

Having appeared before him as a ghost (she hopes to frighten him in to letting her go to London), she perishes when he plunges his rapier into the 'spectre' only too find it is all too obviously flesh and blood.

What happens next proves he is shrewd as well as nasty, since he arranges for his good-natured servant Bob (Mark Stobbart) to take the blame. "The oaf will hang and the truth with him."

"More fool, Bob," you think, as he holds out hopes of a Royal pardon that seems unlikely to come. But accepting that the master is right is central to the mindset of at least one section of the working population - then as now.

That's certainly the case with Bob's long-suffering mother (Beverley Klein), who runs Are's household, if not his black wife Rose (Madeline Appiah).

She says they are in the same sort of slavery that her family escaped from.

Devoted servitude is not the style, either, of the slippery, Sam Weller-ish servant Frank (Michael Shaeffer), whose sharp metropolitan ways offer a telling contrast to the stolid stupidities of country life.

The songs that punctuate the play (composer Adam Cork) contribute to its poetic atmosphere - but at times they interrupt the action and extend what is already a long evening.