When Mark Rylance was its director, the Globe did some pretty odd things, such as staging The Tempest with three actors. Under Dominic Droomgoole it’s doing some pretty ambitious things, such as staging King Lear and, now, a seldom-seen tragedy that in his memoirs Dromgoole himself calls “one of Shakespeare’s meanest plays, rippling with rage and bitterness and envy”. But Trevor Nunn suggested that Timon of Athens had something to say about the greed-is-good generation when he revived the play in modern dress in 1991, and maybe Lucy Bailey’s impressively imaginative production does the same for 2008. After all, here’s the tale of a man who ludicrously overextends himself, only to face ruin when his creditors call in their mortgages and loans and his “friends” prove as unwilling as a modern British bank to bail him out. Call this the sub-prime Timon.

Not that Bailey pushes the comparison.

The costumes are late-medieval and the overt subjects what they should be, mainly ingratitude. The Globe’s stage has become a marble oblong that thrusts out into the pit and proves just the place for the lavish feasts that Simon Paisley Day’s Timon obsessively throws. But his generosity isn’t reciprocated: a finding that turns the philanthropist into a misanthrope, a crazed hermit who is rightly told “the middle of humanity thou never knewst, but the extremity of both ends”.

The problem is a thin plot. Pretty much all that’s left for the disillusioned Timon to do is to snarl, rant and demand humanity’s destruction. But Bailey has her answers. She doesn’t merely turn Timon’s parties into exotic orgies. High above the groundlings she has placed a net on which black-clad men crawl like spiders, then bungee-jump up and down, their raggedy cloaks making them look like crows or vultures as they assail Timon.

The effect isn’t so much Cirque du Soleil as a dark-star or even black-hole circus that embodies Shakespeare’s bleak mood circa 1605, when he wrote both Timon and Lear. But this doesn’t upstage some fine performances: Patrick Godfrey, a steward whose fidelity to Timon never becomes sentimental; Bo Poraj as Timon’s fellow cynic Apemantus, who looks like an icon of John the Baptist and sounds gloatingly severe; and Day himself.

At first his lordly Timon exudes a serenity that’s Christlike yet complacent. Left with nothing but his excrement-smeared Y-fronts, his grimy Timon, grubbing among the ashes now filling the stage, brings great vocal variety to his unending beefs - and leaves you perversely wondering if Bailey’s revival isn’t better than Shakespeare’s play.

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