Actor Gerard Logan was doing what comes naturally in making a one-man show of dramatising Shakespeare's epic narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece.

Despite that, and with 700 lines cut in the interests of audience staying power, it still seemed like one of the longest stage monologues on record.

He told a questioner after his hour-long stint that performing it was easier than appearing in a play, in which even a talkative character gets to take a few breaths. There are scarcely any in this tour de force, directed by Gareth Armstrong and first seen at the Edinburgh Festival.

The truncated poem gets down to essentials from the start, concentrating on the violation of a woman by her partner’s friend and then on her suicide and its aftermath.

We are in Roman times well before what we know as the rise and fall of the Roman empire. But the royal house of Rome is wobbly, and Lucrece comes to symbolise how a political dynasty can be threatened from within. Sounds familiar?

Logan assumes a number of characters - Tarquin the rapist and pitiable Lucrece foremost - with no props save a shawl, a few slivers of recorded incidental music by Simon Slater, and minimal lighting effects by Roger Llewellyn.

On paper, it has the makings of a large chunk of ham, but Logan's performance is anything but. He spins a gripping yarn and is scrupulously and continuously mindful of the changes of pitch needed to mark the rhetoric of incident and meditation. I’d go again just to watch precisely how this Olivier-nominated performer does it.