Never in my theatre-going experience has a first night failed to continue after the interval. Peter Stein's flamboyantly mediocre production of Troilus And Cressida achieved this feat, thanks to mechanical failure: a rear wall is required to move forward and become a steeply raked floor.
When I saw the machinery swinging successfully into action at the Tuesday matinee and watched the last battles uncomfortably fought upon this hazardous incline I realised the uselessness of Ferdinand Wogerbauer's design.
For Troilus And Cressida needs a designer who finds ways of representing, whether by realistic or symbolic means, a shattered world in a seven-year stalemate of war. Wogerbauer's-bland metallic wall is all that he supplies, save for two unused tents.
The long-haired Greek commanders, looking and sounding like a cross between elderly Sixties hippies and bemused refugees standing around in Beckett-land, set a ponderous mood of lethargy which helps drain the play of its governing mood of angry cynicism and ja vitality. Among the Greeks only the Ulysses of that ever dependable actor David Yelland, with his air of a wily diplomat or suave public school headmaster, musters complete conviction.
That other key character, Ian Hughes's Thersites, lacks foulmouthed-venom. Sexual passion, the play's fatal animating factor, remains oddly stifled, deflected and diminished - even Paul Jesson's effeminate Pandarus proves an artificial, antisexual burlesque of the man's complex oddness.
Vincent Regan's portly, muted, unwarlike Achilles refuses to admit or embody Shakespeare's conviction that this once great fighter's obsession for Patroclus is his undoing. Regan's Achilles may have a heel, but misses a gay streak.
The young lovers of the title capture youthfulness but then do not quite know what to with it. Annabel Scholey's attractive Cressida stints on guile and sexual opportunism while Henry Pettigrew's romantic Troilus needs an infusion of furious despair - both of them suffer though from Stein's melodramatic textual changes. Only Richard Clothier's magnificent Hector, swathed in serene and muscular self-confidence, catches the right spirit.
Closes 26 August. Information 0131 529 6000. At Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon 1-9 September, 0870 609 1110.
Troilus and Cressida
King's, Edinburgh
