Troilus and Cressida

This Trojan War drama is the earliest of Shakespeare's so-called 'problem plays'. Not a comedy, tragedy or history, though containing elements of all three, it catches the Bard in unwontedly cynical mode. The heroes of Greek legend are all here, but the play's vision of them is filtered through the perspective of black comedy: the great Achilles is too busy toying with his male favourite, Patroclus, to fight, and when he does finally consent to go into battle he kills his foe by the most dishonourable of means; his cousin Ajax is little more than a vainglorious dolt.

There is a tale of true love in the midst of the seemingly interminable war, celebrated nobly by Homer but here reduced to its basest terms - 'all the argument is a cuckold and a whore', as the scabrous fool Thersites, perhaps the most caustic character in the whole of Shakespeare, says. True to the 'Young Hearts' theme of the current Globe season, director Matthew Dunster has plumped for extreme youth in the casting of the lovers. At first Laura Pyper's Cressida and Paul Stocker's Troilus seem a bit underpowered - it's no doubt intentional that they initially come over as 'Coronation Street'-style romancers - but as the drama unfolds both begin to suggest unsuspected depths of feeling. And that's what's really impressive about Dunster's inventive production. It keeps surprising you by the way it continually cuts through the play's rambling nihilism with shafts of strong and strange emotion: it's there in Ania Sowinski's first irruption as the prophetic Cassandra; in Christopher Colquhoun's too noble warrior Hector; it's even there in Matthew Kelly's fine turn as the bawd Pandarus, played here as a panto dame with tragic self-awareness.