TAKEOVER 14's week-long festival of innovative theatre at York Theatre Royal drew to a close in the main house with a long-established Greek drama specialist and a Fringe company in the line of The Tiger Lilies and The League Of Gentlemen.

Now run from Brighton, Actors of Dionysus spent seven years of their 21 years in York, where they made a name for "seriously sexy" takes on the works of the usual ancient Greek suspects, a kind of Dial M For Medea. The company last toured their former home in 2008 and returned last Friday with a work that keeps the ancient angst and actress Tamsin Shasha's obligatory Hellenic scream but updates the setting.

Helen Of Troy is 20, maybe 30 years on from her ship-launching peak and, transported to a modern war zone, she is undergoing her latest facelift to keep her iconic looks, held captive with only a 24-hour TV news station and Spanish circus artist MarcosTajadura's shadowy guard for company, but stripped of his tongue and testicles.

Shasha has added the high-flying skills of an aerialist to her repertoire, used very effectively here to represent Helen's desperation to escape, while Shasha and director Jonathan Young's script has an urgency that eluded Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. "We're f****d", said Helen, as she ran out of options. Actors Of Directness indeed.

Macclesfield's theatre of the absurd troupe, Kill The Beast, bring to mind Michael Gambon's quote when asked what he did for a living, replying : "Shouting in the evening". It is, however, very productive shouting, especially if you enjoy humour with the manic energy of student and Fringe theatre, here matched to Robert Wiene's 1920 German silent horror movie, The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari.

Writer-director Clem Garritty ,writer-performers David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, Oliver Jones and Zoe Roberts and projection designer Bryan Woltjen make merry with Tom Baker's tale of pig-bashing, combining blood-splattered merriment with a Grim Reaper's black humour. They will surely return.