The Secret Theatre, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, review: a compelling spy thriller set in Elizabeth I's court

Anders Lustgarten's compelling play takes its title from John le Carre's contention that “Espionage is the secret theatre of our society”. It finds in the spy network around Elizabeth I an image of our own surveillance state and in the spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, the classic case of a man whose obsessive concern for security leads him to sacrifice too much to ensure the country's safety, institutionalising fear.

We're in the late 1580s. Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth's Catholic rival, is imprisoned and there's the anxious prospect of a Spanish invasion. There's no doubt here about the sincerity of Walsingham's commitment to the Protestant cause nor to his belief that papists posed a supranational threat. What's questionable are his tactics.

He stages a fake assassination attempt on the Queen; he hardens hostility towards Mary by stirring up the Babington plot to put her on the throne; he loses his son-in-law, Sir Philip Sidney, in a diversionary war he devises in the Netherlands, forfeiting the love of his only child.

Aidan McArdle plays him as the driven little spider at the centre of this web of double-dealing, increasingly fixated and prey to illness and horribly alone. Tara Fitzgerald is unrecognizable in the white leaded make-up and fright-wig and I don't know where Lustgarten got the idea of a foul-mouthed Elizabeth with a yearning for rough-sex. The joke is that the myth of the Virgin Queen is supposed to be the state's biggest triumph as a propaganda coup. Fizgerald pulls it off with vitriolic aplomb, forever distrustful and contemptuous of her spymaster because she thinks he is building a rival power base for himself.

The contemporary parallels are sometimes a bit heavy handed. But there some witty thrusts. It's grimly droll that the torturer Topcliffe confesses to the modern perception that torture doesn't elicit reliable information in the unsparing scene where he has Jesuit priest and devotional poet Robert Southwell on the rack; he just does it just because he likes sadism.

This is not what Walsingham – who has long dreamed of having Southwell in his clutches, avid for hard facts – wants to hear. And Southwell tortures him back by turning the tables and saying that Walsingham is, in fact, the finest recruiter to the Catholic cause and by begging to be martyred by him.

Matthew Dunster's finely acted production uses the shadowy intimacy of the Playhouse to powerful effect. The gold-embossed panels become the drawers of filing cabinets that seem push themselves open and offer up their voice. The music has a thin, creepy scratchiness. The recurring image of lowered chandeliers being systematically snuffed out is a shuddering reminder that espionage is one of the dark arts. Flawed, but remarkably stimulating.

'The Secret Theatre' is at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London till 16 December; shakespearesglobe.com