HOW controversial would a play about incest be if it were written today?

Some way between ‘quite’ and ‘very’, I suggest. So what must the audience reaction have been 380 or so years ago when ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore was first presented?

John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy must have been an eye-opener: letters in blood, poisoned wine, multiple murders — grist to anyone’s mill those days — but a physical passion between a brother and sister (Giovanni and Annabella) that lies at the heart of the whole drama? No wonder it was even omitted from what was meant to be an edition of Ford’s complete works in the early 1830s.

And no wonder the play attracted the eye of Declan Donnellan, the adventurous director and co-founder of the Cheek By Jowl theatre company, who brings it to the Playhouse next week.

Playing the part of Soranzo (who eventually marries Annabella when she has become pregnant by Giovanni — do keep up!) is 26-year-old Jack Hawkins (a fine name for a thespian, but no relation).

He lives in north London these days, but this is very much a return to Oxford for him: he was reading Jurisprudence at Balliol College a few years ago, but admits to spending most of his time acting: “There were lots of plays every term, and there was a central casting system; so one could look at a website and there was a list of everybody doing a production — from all the colleges — and they’d put up notes saying ‘We want four male and three female actors for such-and-such’. So you didn’t have to be a member of a specific college to be in a play they were putting on. I never did a play with the Balliol Drama Society!”

Hawkins spread his acting talents wide, given the system he describes: for example Love’s Labours Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Claw (by Harold Barker) and Fuente Ovejuna (by Lope de Veja — The Oxford Times archive contains a February 2006 review of this, naming Hawkins).

He got his law degree, but the drama school LAMDA beckoned. Hardly surprisingly, he’s embraced the opportunity to do Whore with Cheek by Jowl, and was, he told me, impressed by one specific aspect when he came to the company: “You need innovative people in a company.

“I think most actors are used to turning up on the first day of rehearsals to meet a designer who has already designed the set and there’s already red tape on the floor to mark out the doors and the windows.

“But Nick Ormerod, Cheek’s designer, just put his hand up in the air and said ‘I don’t know what the set is! I’m going to watch you and design it while you’re performing, and I’ll make suggestions and then you make suggestions and we’ll work it out’. That’s the whole process with this company: together we’ll find a set, a character, maybe even the story’.”

And there’s one element of the story in ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore that Hawkins has latched on to: “The difference between depiction of men and women; the power with which the women in the play are used — that they are bartered for and traded.

It might be more subtle now, but it still goes on. Because of the subject matter, it’s a difficult play to watch and it was always meant to be: the intention from the start was not to give the audience an easy ride but to take them on a roller-coaster ride that they are forced to experience through to the end”.

Is it giving too much away to say Jack Hawkins’ character Soranzo doesn’t survive until the play’s end?

In the course of our talk, he tells me he yearns to be cast in a comedy role: ’tis pity, but maybe not quite yet!

’Tis Pity She’s A Whore is at the Playhouse from February 7-11.