As so often, I emerged from this theatre with mixed feelings. Gratitude at hearing Marlowe's virtually unknown play was somewhat tempered by the arch infantilism of Tim Carroll's modern-dress production, which seemed to be influenced less by the spirit of Virgil's Aeneid than that of Enid Blyton.
Marlowe's early play, dating from around 1585, is fascinating for a variety of reasons. Since it starts with Jupiter toying with a "female wanton boy" in the shape of Ganymede, it is the first gay English drama. In Aeneas's graphic description of the horrors of the sack of Troy ("Young infants swimming in their parents' blood"), it also gives Elizabethan blank verse a new, vivid flexibility.
And it clearly had an enormous influence on Shakespeare. Aeneas's evocation of Priam's grisly death is echoed and parodied by the First Player in Hamlet, divine intervention in mortal affairs is picked up in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the doomed love of Dido and Aeneas prefigures Antony and Cleopatra.
Faced with a rich, under-rated text, Carroll and his designer, Laura Hopkins, have decided to set the action in a children's playground dominated by a curved climbing frame and a long, metallic slide. The reasoning seems to be that this will exhibit the juvenile cruelty of the gods.
All it does in practice, as when Robin Phillips took a similar decision with Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, is to trivialise the action. The transformation of Aeneas's son, Ascanius, into an Archie Andrews-like ventriloquist doll and the use of toy guns, joke arrows and soap bubbles help to turn Marlowe's tragic and humane love story into a whimsical romp.
Seated in the theatre's lower gallery, I found myself distracted, not for the first time, by the endless gropings of the groundlings. Deciding that if you can't beat them, it's best to join them, I stood for the second half, and only then found it possible to enter into the imaginative world of the play. I began to appreciate much more the versatility of the six-strong cast, headed by Will Keen's duty-driven Aeneas and Rakie Ayola's betrayed, grief-stricken Dido.
I even momentarily saw the point of the playground-production when Dave Fishley's Hermes put an unforgiving boot into Aeneas's sand-castle version of a reconstructed Troy. But neither a few blithe touches nor the attractiveness of Claire van Kampen's score can justify a production that robs Marlowe's play of its Virgilian pathos and adult seriousness.
· In rep until August 18. Box office: 020-7401 9919.
