Expectation whirls me round, to borrow a phrase from Troilus, at the prospect of seeing again this lately neglected cynic’s Iliad. But while Gregory Doran’s production offers many good things, it suffers from an intensive aural bombardment that threatens to overwhelm the sinewy text.
Doran has engaged the virtuoso percussionist Evelyn Glennie, aided by Dave Price, to provide a soundscape to Shakespeare’s anti-heroic portrait of the Trojan war. Glennie deploys a vast array of instruments, including timpani and tam-tams, and an overhanging mix of metallic junk even vibrates to evoke military clamour. The result is often intrusive, so that Ulysses, envisioning the collapse of hierarchies, has no sooner said, “Hark what discord follows” than we hear a dissonant rumbling.
Doran’s key idea of gender parity in casting, while fine in principle, proves odd in practice: the scabby philosopher Thersites is played by Sheila Reid as a soft-spoken Scot whose choric cry of “wars and lechery – nothing else holds fashion” gets lost amid the din.
Two performances stand out. Adjoa Andoh memorably brings out the manipulative monstrosity behind Ulysses’s beguiling rhetoric, literally loading the dice when it comes to the choice of a Greek champion to fight Hector. Oliver Ford Davies is a classic Pandarus, brimming over with senile prurience so that even a line such as “I’ll go get a fire” gains a lurking suggestiveness. The central lovers are also well played, with Amber James’s spryly intelligent Cressida provoked beyond endurance by the naive insistence of Gavin Fowler’s Troilus on her fidelity.
There is still a central paradox about this production. Everything about Niki Turner’s design, with its vast container trucks, and warriors swathed in futuristic goggles and jangling ironmongery, implies that we are in some chaotic, postapocalyptic world. Shakespeare’s play is clearly about the disintegration of moral certainties and established values but it also takes place against a Homeric background. Debunking mythic heroes loses much of its pungency if you are already on the road to dystopia.
• At the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 17 November.
