In Gregory Doran’s vital production, Shakespeare’s allegedly problem play bursts onstage to a thunderous clap of percussion. Literally. Two motor-cyclists roar out of a large box into leather clad world of Greeks and Trojans, made ever urgent and eerie by percussionist Evelyn Glennie’s score.

Modernity isn’t overworked or intrusive, it merely establishes the universality of the violent theme. This might as well be gang war with similarly misplaced ideas of honour as ancient Troy, seven years besieged by the Greeks intent upon rescuing their abducted queen, Helen.

As the besiegers quarrel amongst themselves, young Trojans, Prince Troilus and Cressida fall in love, only for her to give herself to another, and for him to also suffer disillusion about the romanticism of the war.

Written in 1602, shortly after Hamlet, it may have been intended for study not for performance: for Shakespeare to develop his ideas about the excesses of idealised romance and honour, rather than concentrate on a central plot. Doran has responded with an energy that bring the parts closer together, in designer Niki Turner’s Mad Max world.

And there is so much of interest. Andy Apollo as Achilles is a muscular, bare-chested, narcissist, concerned not with new acts of heroism, but with maintaining his reputation as a celebrity warrior, risk free and at any cost.

Casting across gender delivers Suzanne Bertish as the Greek commander, Agamemnon, placing a female flourish on pomposity, masking ineffectiveness. Adjoa Andoh is dynamically persuasive as Ulysses the sly ideas ‘man’. And the vulgar, scabrous, licensed critic Thersites who spares no one his idea of truth, is perkily realised in the tiny, Scottish voiced frame of Sheila Reid.

The romance between the title characters is not central to the play, and is really all his. As Cressida, Amber James, is tight-lipped and disengaged, perhaps protesting about male manipulation. That’s in the hands of her Uncle Pandarus, although Oliver Ford Davies with consummate charm and humour, disarms his role in organising the lecherous ways of the world.

As Troilus, Gavin Fowler ably conveys the follies and impatience of youth: the lust and simultaneous need to idealise, the despairing disillusion when supplanted by another, the sullen anger and cynicism that grow following Achilles treacherous murder of his brother, the Trojan hero Hector.

Daniel Hawksford, as Hector, inhabits the noblest Trojan of them all with grace and humanity, conscious of the need for wider values, but committed to his warrior creed, and therefore to the war that grinds on relentlessly and destructively.

There is comedy in the selfish, light-headed, love-making of Paris (Geoffrey Lumb) and Helen (Daisy Badger), the couple that created the conflict, and in the stupidity and pretention of Ajax (Theo Ogundipe), a would be super champion.

What there is not is any sense of culmination or purpose achieved: an ending of disenchantment and blood. One reason perhaps why Troilus with its many facets has never achieved popularity. Yet, here is art mirroring life with its random cruelties and blessings, temporary gains and losses, and insight into how we enjoy or sour our opportunities. A problem play because we do not know it or study it as it deserves. A problem that more productions like this would do much to resolve.

★★★★☆    Derek Briggs         26^th October 2018

Photo by Helen Maybanks