[In the following review, Murray assesses the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Troilus and Cressida, directed by Ian Judge. Murray's review is mixed as he finds fault with Joseph Fiennes's whining Troilus and with Victoria Hamilton's shallow Cressida, but praises several of the other male roles and states that as a whole the production offered a “defensible” take on the play.]

Ian Judge's RSC production of Troilus and Cressida has come up from Stratford-on-Avon to the Barbican. Troilus is not among the favoured Shakespeare plays that come round regularly (it is perhaps thought to be too raunchy for A-levels), so we want it to be lucid and not overly kinked. That is what Judge gives us: a near- complete text, mostly well spoken, in a staging that has its epic passages and some teasing slants.

The main slant is toward sweaty, homerically masculine affairs. The women—Cassandra, Helen, Andromache and Cressida herself—live only on the margins of the real (but meaningless) action, a blind sporting contest between the Trojan guys and the Greeks.

In thongs and tangas, the men preen, pose and compete to the death. While Cressida's lubricious uncle Pandarus identifies the Trojan heroes for her, Judge has them stripping off for a steam-bath. Achilles and his tall young friend Patroclus exchange long, manly kisses, as little disturbed by Thersites' nasty jeers as any Gay Lib activists would be.

Judge paces the larger action very well, all the way to the final scenes of inevitable, irrational slaughter. The slighter but crucial thread, young Troilus's passionate connection with Cressida, is not so happy. Victoria Hamilton's pretty Cressida is a touching little minx, not more, while Joseph Fiennes pulls out the vox humana stop early on—with added tremolo—and never turns it off: his strangulated bleat becomes a whine long before the end.

The other men are sturdy and interesting. Philip Voss makes the wily Ulysses smooth and reptilian, apparently without any game-plan of his own—a wheeler-dealer with no purposes. Louis Hillyer finds more substance in Hector, pragmatically decent, than one expects. Clive Francis is a superbly creepy Pandarus. As burly Ajax, Ross O'Hennessy looks to have been put on steroids for the season, but he plays him less clownishly than usual.

Generally the characterisations are sharp, though Philip Quast's Achilles remains a bit of a cipher. As Thersites, Richard McCabe makes a flamboyant start with the Prologue, but soon declines into conventional growls and subversive mutters; during the last battles, Judge has him dashing to the forestage to bellow an angry line or two and then fleeing again.

There is a lot of stage-smoke to go with the military un-dress and macho capering. The big argumentative speeches are solidly delivered, and make us listen hard. A sense of cynical futility hangs over all the proceedings, unleavened by anything humane. It is a defensible reading of the play, of course, and grittily consistent.

We watch it fascinated and repelled. In repertoire at the Barbican Theatre, to March 25.