Marlowe’s history play gets a modern day remake that brings its psychosexual complexities to the fore.

I’m sat in a vaulted rehearsal room in the loft of Malthouse Theatre, and for a good ten minutes, director Matthew Lutton has been discussing the nuances of a silence with his actors. It’s a pause in the dialogue of his upcoming production of Edward II that lasts only a few seconds, but it’s placement and impetus are being forensically trialled. It seems like a lot of effort for such a fleeting moment in a play that runs for almost two hours, but this is not time wasted. Details matter to Lutton.

This will be the second time in his debut season as the Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Malthouse, that Lutton has taken an existing, historically-fixed narrative and given it a contemporary voice. In March, he tackled Tom Wright’s adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s iconic supernatural mystery, Picnic at Hanging Rock, transporting it from the sun-blasted rocks of Mount Macedon to an ominous and counterintuitively icy Victorian parlour. His rejection of the synonymous parched crags, familiar to most Australians from Peter Weir’s seminal 1975 film version, taunted the audience with...