A question nagged away at me throughout the near three hours of the thrilling new production of John Webster’s Jacobean bloodbath, The White Devil. Since this is figuring in the RSC’s ‘Roaring Girls’ season of plays “with powerfully fascinating women at their heart”, then who is the character of this sort here? Who, indeed, is the devil?

Is it the adulterous Vittoria Corombona (Kirsty Bushell), whose eager submission to Duke Bracciano (David Sturzaker) sets in motion the whole grisly process towards a closing pile of corpses, hers among them? Or is it her scheming sister Flaminio (Laura Elphinstone) who works to promote the illicit union, in a grimly comic scene, thereby extending her influence with the duke and, hopefully, her fortune?

On balance, the second seems likelier. In the original, Flaminio is Vittoria’s brother: the sex change is designed to point up how women, too, can be misogynists.

Director Maria Aberg’s is a brilliant take on a play whose forceful and poetic language invites comparison with that of a more famous King’s Man, Shakespeare. There appear in it, in fact, clear allusions to his works, as when Vittoria and Flaminio’s mother (Liz Crowther) distributes plants Ophelia-like after the death — shockingly by Flaminio’s hand — of her third child, Marcello (Peter Bray). The action is updated to the present with Vittoria having the look of a sex worker as she dons a blonde wig (along with her clothes) in a solo scene at the start of the play. Many such tonsorial adornments follow.

This dressing-up takes place on the bare stage where much of the gruesome action occurs. So, also, do two spirited dance routines from the cast, to pulsating, stirring music composed by David Maclean and Tommy Grace of rock band Django Django. Behind is a white-walled box whose front is sometimes a screen for startling projected images and sometimes transparent for key episodes acted out behind — Flaminio’s murder of Vittoria’s husband Camillo (Keir Charles), for instance.

Bracciano’s wife Isabella (Faye Castelow) also perishes horribly there, from poison, while brushing her teeth. I thought the toothpaste had been tampered with. In fact, the poison is on a miniature portrait of her husband she habitually kisses at night.

The revenge for her murder by her brother, the Duke of Florence (Simon Scardifield) becomes a driving force of the plot. He has a useful ally in the influential figure of the corrupt Cardinal Monticelso, who later becomes Pope, no less. He is portrayed in all his dignity (and astonishingly crooked manipulativeness) in a beautifully spoken performance by the ever-reliable David Rintoul.

The White Devil
Swan Theatre, Stratford
Until November 29
Tickets: 0844 800 1110 or rsc.org.uk