The Massacre in Paris

The first run of Marlowe's brutal and incendiary masterpiece to be staged in England in 400 years returns to the Rose – the site of its very first performance in 1593 – after its sell-out success earlier this year.

Marlowe's last play retells twenty years of the French Wars of Religion at breakneck speed, from the cold planning of mass murder, through the shocking events of the notorious 1572 St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, to the poisoning of Charles IX, and the coronation and subsequent assassination of his flamboyant, homosexual brother Henry III. The play's anti-hero, the villainous Duke of Guise, proves the ultimate Marlovian over-reacher.