GRAHAM McLaren admits Glasgow company Theatre Babel had never considered touring England to be a priority. Scotland, yes, Ireland, yes, Wales, yes, even Jersey, yes, but England, no.

Then came last October's ground-breaking raid across the border to York Theatre Royal to perform Medea, in a new version by Liz Lochhead, best remembered in York for her 1992 and 1996 scripts for the York Mystery Plays.

Next week, Theatre Babel return to the Theatre Royal, for the only English dates of their spring tour of John Ford's passionate Renaissance tragedy 'Tis Pity She's A Whore.

McLaren stresses there was no anti-English sentiment behind the no-show policy. "We just felt our type of work was already being done in England by companies such as Cheek By Jowl," he says.

"Our visit to York last year came about through a casual talk with an old friend of mine, Damian Cruden McLaren's fellow Scot and Theatre Royal artistic director.

"He said 'You must come down here', so we did, and I'm delighted we've started a relationship with the Theatre Royal. We've never believed in hit-and-run touring, or just going wherever is available. Instead, we like to build relations."

That relationship began with a Greek play about infanticide; it continues with another "difficult" classic: Ford's 1632 tale of incestuous love and serial killing, a radical re-working of the Romeo And Juliet story.

In 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, Annabella and Giovanni are young, wilful and in love; their passionate affair will turn society on its head, unleashing a train of events that lead inexorably to death. Their crime? Incest.

"Incest is one of the few taboos that we've still not come to terms with. Even with paedophilia, we've found a way to bring it out into the open, but not incest," says McLaren. "Incest is still harrowing to us.

"That, and the fact that John Ford has written a remarkable play, but not a great play, on this subject makes it difficult to perform."

McLaren's production has done away with the distracting sub-plot to focus on the central story, creating a mean and lean version more in keeping with today's equivalents of Jacobean tragedy, such as Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs or Mark Ravenhill's Shopping And *******.

"I think we look at character motivation and psychological elements in plays, which was just not an issue to Ford or the Jacobeans," Graham says. "We want to remove barriers from the audience, so we've taken out the confusing subplot; we've cut out the Jacobean jokes that are just anathema to us, and we now have a chamber piece that's more intimate and feels like a modern play by Harold Pinter, with modern concerns, but in blank verse."

McLaren draws comparisons between past and present writers and film-makers. "Ford is to Shakespeare what Tarantino is to Martin Scorsese. Ford is much more of a cynic than Shakespeare; his work is like the raw, in-your-face plays of the Nineties by Sarah Kane, Irvine Welsh and Mark Ravenhill," he says.

'Tis Pity She's A Whore, Theatre Babel, York Theatre Royal, April 30 and May 1, 7.30pm. Tickets: £7 to £14.25, concessions available; ring 01904 623568.