Troilus and Cressida, Globe Theatre review - a 'problem play' with added problems

The Globe’s authenticity is its USP, so don’t expect the air-conditioning, the plush seats and the expectant hush of the National Theatre some 20 minutes walk away along the Thames. There’s not quite Elizabethan levels of discomfort to endure, so no plague – well, not if you’ve had your jabs.

It’s quite fun to roll with the open air vibe and wooden benches with poles in your eyeline like a Victorian football stadium or stand in the pit, looking up, like Baldrick in Season One. But does it need to be quite as much of an ordeal as my visit to the Troilus and Cressida Thursday matinee proved to be?

Some actors are inaudible, but not all, which only makes it more irritating that they can’t all match Oliver Alvin-Wilson’s diction as an excellent Hector (not a bad name for a character who can project). That fault, the only one Stephen Sondheim could not forgive in a theatre, comes as much from the speed at which the line readings are delivered as the volume and pitch of the voices. The circular space’s acoustics roll one word into the next, bringing the added detriment of us losing the poetry and weight of the text written by the man celebrated all around us. And sometimes the cast is competing with planes overhead (fair enough) and music from the band (not fair enough).

Perhaps this could be dismissed as a bit of a whinge or the lament of man whose ears are no longer the precision instruments they once were, but this play is as obscure as any in the Folios and is, even with cuts, wordy. Frankly, it needs all the help it can get. There are no clues from costumes or accents as soldiers, kings and princesses are all dressed as if collecting kids from a primary school in an area where abolishing stamp duty isn’t high on the list of voters’ priorities. Who are these people?

So I can review only what I heard and what I understood, but it really shouldn’t be quite so difficult, should it?
Troy has been besieged by Greece for seven long years, everyone exhausted by the struggle. Troilus, a prince of Troy, falls for Cressida, a Trojan woman, whose father has aligned with the Greeks. Meanwhile, as the Puck-like Thersites (Lucy McCormick) comments sardonically at the foolishness of it all, the testosterone-soaked warriors grow bored and fat, as the world all but stops turning under the sheer inertia of the standoff.

There’s certainly a bit of a better play’s star-crossed lovers in the title characters’ affair, Kasper Hilton-Hille and Charlotte O’Leary (pictured above with Samantha Spiro) capturing much of Romeo and Juliet’s youthful charm, if little of their majestic poetry. But like much else in what seems simultaneously both a rushed and overly long production under Owen Horsley’s hectic direction, that subplot is whisked away before it has had a chance to breathe.

David Caves’ Achilles has a lot of Harry Enfield’s Wayne Slob about him, beer-bellied and resting on past glories and the shoulder of his lover, Patroclus (the boybandishly pretty Tadeo Martinez). Pandarus (a gender-flipped, orange-haired, Barbara Windsor-voiced Samantha Spiro) is busy matchmaking with a lascivious glee, while another gender-flipped character, Ulysses, delivers self-consciously long speeches while dressed like a Nazi apparatchik from ‘Allo ‘Allo. Lucy McCormick doubles as Helen of Troy, inexplicably gaudily made-up (nothing in this production pleases the eye) as a wild Weimar cabaret singer.

The tone veers about vertiginously – that may be more the script than the execution – but though this production goes for a Catch-22ish satire on the futility and waste of war, it fails to leaven it with poignancy or wit. So when Cressida is offered up by her father to the thuggish Diomedes (Conor Glenn) and passed around his comrades for groping – and, by implication, much more – it’s just cold and horrible. There is nobody to root for in this production, and disgust and pity are two tough emotions to hold for 165 minutes.

Not that everyone did. Plenty of people walked out, The Globe’s groundlings having that liberty of course. That was their verdict, but I tended to agree with the occupant of a seat a few along the row from mine. There, through most of the second half, a baby cried.    

• Troilus and Cressida at The Globe Theatre until 26 October
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk