Troilus and Cressida

Published Tuesday 3 June 2008 at 18:30 by Susan Elkin

Declan Donnellan’s brave stab at this curate’s egg of a play - which can’t quite make up its mind how tragic it is and suffers from a lack of the structural cohesion which underpins, say, Henry V or The Merchant of Venice - entertains more often than it doesn’t.

Lucy Briggs-Owen is quite something as the sensitive sweet-voiced Cressida who is also capable of anger, passion and innocent let’s-have-a-good time sex as she jokingly flashes her nakedness at David Collings’s ponderous, prurient, manipulative Pandarus. Alex Waldmann is more of a problem as the diminutive, wimpish Troilus - not a lot of male charisma for girl to get excited about.

The horror of the Trojan Cressida’s being handed over by her father to the woman-hungry Greeks is chillingly well handled, although on the whole the military scenes come off less well than the family ones. Anthony Mark Berrow is weak as Agamemnon and I was unmoved by David Caves’s Hector, but there’s a strong performance from Ryan Kiggell as the intense, humourless, but susceptible Ulysses. And I enjoyed Paul Brennen’s camp Achilles, Marianne Oldham’s media-savvy Helen and Tom McClane’s attractive Aeneas.

Nick Ormerod’s simple tennis court-sized set slashed diagonally through the centre of the Barbican Theatre brings the action very close and is effective acoustically as well as visually - light years away from the original design intention of the building.

The verse speaking is commendably clear and Cheek by Jowl’s trademark physicality is alive and well. But the pace flags at times and I wasn’t sorry when it was over.