The Duchess of Malfi, Lyttelton Theatre

Six years have passed since we last saw the tall, commanding figure of Janet McTeer on stage. In 1997, as Nora in A Doll's House, she gave one of the most searching Ibsen performances London has witnessed. She travelled with that production to New York, garnered a well-deserved Tony and was then snapped up by the movies. Was she, one had begun to wonder, lost for ever to live performance?

The answer, joyously, is no. In Phyllida Lloyd's stark, modern-dress production of The Duchess of Malfi in the Lyttelton, McTeer is back on the boards, giving a magnificent performance as John Webster's Jacobean heroine – a widow in the prime of life who defies her suffocatingly meddling and possessive brothers and embarks on a clandestine second marriage to her steward.

The horrors inflicted on the Duchess, when her siblings discover her secret, can – if staged by the book – feel as hammy and as Hammer as a ride on the Ghost Train. The updating in Lloyd's production renovates our sense of the seriously repulsive and psychologically warped nature of the torments the heroine is forced to endure. Instead of the usual embarrassing masque of mad men gibbering round her, McTeer's Duchess is strapped into a chair, injected with drugs and forced to watch a hideous Clockwork Orange-like film that mixes her worst memories and her most nightmarish fears (a repeated image, say, of a child with blood dribbling from its nose). On the wide flight of steps at the back of the stage, a lunatic audience watches this fearful cinematic farrago with convulsive enthusiasm.

Mark Thompson's design is stripped back and steeped in Stygian gloom. Webster's picture of decadent Renaissance Italy now has overtones of Scorsese and Coppola, peopled by dark-suited heavies and corrupt clerics. True, the contemporary relocation makes plot devices such as the poisoned prayer book look a bit silly. But, in general, it works well. It releases the characters from the stock types of Jacobean Central Casting into a freshly creepy reality.

Will Keen,as the Duchess's unnervingly disturbed brother, Ferdinand, superbly suggests that he has displaced his own morbid self-distrust and sense of inadequacy into an obsessive (and incestuous) sexual suspicion of her.

McTeer's Duchess, poised, elegant, full of warmth, humour and humanity, is utterly convincing at every stage of the character's journey. She never lets the poetry put a decorative glaze on this woman's suffering. We can only hope she will not leave us waiting as long again before her next stage role.