A special frisson arises from watching this late Shakespeare play in a building so closely connected with its writer and his subject.

Holy Trinity Church was the setting for Shakespeare's baptism. I feel sure, though, that this can have been nothing like the occasion of pomp and pageantry (complete with winsome baby) depicted in that of Princess Elizabeth at the climax of the play.

It is also where the Bard is buried - which can rarely be forgotten during the progress of a drama so focused on decline, death and reputation.

In fact, it was not his fame as a writer that earned him the honour of interment in the church. It was a simple matter of money (another of the play's primary concerns) in that he had bought a share in Holy Trinity's privileges after Henry VIII suppressed the college of priests which had previously lavished so much care upon it.

Curiously, the tremendous religious ructions that characterised Henry's reign are rather glossed over in the play, by AandBC theatre company, which instead concentrates on political intrigues. As theological debate is omitted, so, too, is any close analysis of the character of Henry.

Antony Byrne gives us the traditional strutting, sporting, wenching portrait of hot-headed Henry. But as he does so - looking every inch as if he'd stepped from the iconic Holbein portrait - we might pause to wonder how little textual justification there is for it all.

In truth, the play's focus is on the venal, manipulative Cardinal Wolsey, of whom his political foe the Duke of Norfolk (David Annen) says: "No man's pie is free from his ambitious finger." Anthony O'Donnell offers a gripping study of this odious figure, who falls like a stone when his treachery is uncovered.

This, of course, concerns his dealings with Rome over Henry's divorce from Katherine of Aragon (Corinne Jaber) and subsequent marriage to sexy young Anne (Aoife McMahon).

The great speech that comes after his ruin ("When I am forgotten, as I shall be, and sleep in dull, cold marble") is rivalled in its poetry and power only by the moving farewell of his victim, the Duke of Buckingham (Derek Hutchinson) at the scaffold ("And when you would say something that is sad, speak how I fell").

It runs until Saturday, September 2.