Cressida (Sophie Okonedo) spins slowly --- and woundingly --- at the end of Trevor Nunn's new staging of "Troilus and Cressida," but this bruising play's damaged heroine isn'tthe only one left reeling at the close of a nearly four-hour production.

Cressida (Sophie Okonedo) spins slowly — and woundingly — at the end of Trevor Nunn’s new staging of “Troilus and Cressida,” but this bruising play’s damaged heroine isn’tthe only one left reeling at the close of a nearly four-hour production. The first of six shows at the National this year (“Candide” is next) to incorporate a resident ensemble, this “Troilus” is a reminder not only of the dark, savage power of this most contemporary of Shakespeare plays but, importantly, of the no less fierce lucidity of a director who — on form — remains a virtually matchless classicist.

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Is Nunn’s “Troilus” perfect? Not quite — it misses the nerve-jangling glimpse into the abyss achieved by Howard Davies’ Royal Shakespeare Co. production (under Nunn’s RSC stewardship), with Clive Merrison as a definitive Pandarus, more than a decade ago.

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But after a halting start, the National’s first-ever stab at an unclassifiable play (is “Troilus” satire? tragedy? threnody?) builds to a haunting whole that finds the sorrowful immediacy in Shakespeare’s blighted vision without having to relocate the play spuriously for today.

Such updating, in any case, is hardly necessary, given a text whose relentless cynicism tallies all too well with our very own waning, worn-out century. It’s not merely that we have known our share of conflicts that have outlasted their reason for being, much like the ongoing Greek-Trojan strife into which Shakespeare plunges us headlong.

Just as topical is a scandal-mongering milieu that traffics in salaciousness and sleaze, pulling everyone down with it. “Wars and lechery,” gurgles Thersites (Jasper Britton), a scuttling voluptuary of combat and rot. “Nothing else holds fashion.” Except, that is, for the “common arbitrator” (or so Hector calls it) we call time, against which even man’s most vile deceptions are defenseless.

It’s easy to see the play’s appeal in the present day (indeed, this is one of a slew of local “Troilus”-es recent and to come), just as the play’s pitfalls are always equally clear. Talky and dense and rife with unusually knotted swatches of rhetoric, “Troilus” can be a chore for all but Shakespeare obsessives, which makes it that much more of an achievement that Nunn’s revival reaps such rewards.

Oddly, the production is at its best where least anticipated: in those lengthy scenes in the Trojan and especially the Greek camps in which philosophical musing gives way to political and sexual gamesmanship, and worse. Gathering round the bearded Priam (Oscar James) on Rob Howell’s scorched-earth set like so many eager acolytes, these Trojans are an almost honorable lot compared to the jousting, leather-garbed Greeks who can resemble an avid Oxbridge debating team one minute (they cheer one another’s speeches, accordingly), a band of incipient rapists the next.

Under Nunn’s keen eye, each combatant is sharply realized, from Roger Allam’s eloquent, sarcastic Ulysses (the performance of the evening, and brilliantly spoken) to Denis Quilley’s Shavian Nestor and Simon Day’s hilariously dim, vaguely thuggish Ajax.

The Trojans — Pandarus (David Bamber) curiously excepted — are black, the Greeks white, though, having made a presumably pointed casting decision, Nunn refuses to push racial buttons. (The exception: the ruthless butchering by the Greeks of Dhobi Oparei’s Trojan leader, Hector, a moment that — as staged — bristles with ugly resonances for today.)

But it’s important to the play’s merciless view of human misdeeds that venality exists within the Greek ranks, as well: No sooner has Patroclus (Daniel Evans) breathed his last than Thersites is stripping Achilles’ beloved sidekick of his jewels, pausing to give the dead soldier one final kick for the road.

Where do Troilus and Cressida themselves enter? That’s an ongoing problem with a play whose title characters can be eclipsed by the machinations that surround them. So it’s a tribute to Peter de Jersey that this vibrant actor keeps the lovesick hero Troilus continually fresh (and gratefully unwhiny) just as Okonedo — in the more difficult role — moves from (somewhat excessive) girlish flirtation to a benumbed fearfulness and beyond.

Realizing that the brutishness of the Greeks demands its own guileful, pragmatic response, Okonedo’s Cressida emerges all too fully as all things to men, at mournful cost to her own identity.

Oddly, the play’s two juiciest roles register far less well here. A generally terrific actor, Bamber makes a disconcertingly external fusspot of Pandarus, though there’s something grimly funny about this matchmaker’s desire to insinuate himself into the young lovers’ passionate embrace.

A wiry miscreant who at one point impersonates a raven while resembling a wispy-haired scarecrow, Britton’s Thersites comes across as a misconceived and not always intelligible turn. Both performances are too studied by half.

Still, these qualms fade away as the production gains momentum, with Paul Pyant’s lighting eventually bathing both sides of a senseless war in an infernal glow that more than illustrates Achilles’ “ugly night.” The days are ugly, too, in “Troilus and Cressida,” and it’s a measure of Nunn’s take on some none-too-valiant Homeric times that he yanks us, along with his shattered Cressida, right inside this play’s singularly hellish heart.

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Troilus and Cressida

Royal National Theater/Olivier, London; 1,091 seats; $:27 ($44) top

  • Production: A Royal National Theater presentation of the play in two acts by William Shakespeare. Directed by Trevor Nunn.
  • Crew: Sets and costumes, Rob Howell; lighting, Paul Pyant; music, Gary Yershon; sound, Colin Pink; fight director, Malcolm Ranson; movement and dance, Lucie Pankhurst. Opened, reviewed March 15, 1999. Running time: 3 HOURS, 40 MIN.
  • Cast: Troilus - Peter de Jersey Cressida - Sophie Okonedo Hector - Dhobi Oparei Achilles - Raymond Coulthard Patroclus - Daniel Evans Ajax - Simon Day Thersites - Jasper Britton Pandarus - David Bamber Menelaus - David Burt Ulysses - Roger Allam Nestor - Denis Quilley Diomedes - Alexander Hanson Cassandra - Jax Williams With: Gilz Terera, Ruddy L. Davis, Michael Wildman, Mark Springer, Chu Omambala, Claudia Cadette, Oscar James, John Nolan, Mark Embers, Oliver Cotton, Aislinn Sands, Sara Powell, Andrew French, Vernon Douglas, David Arneil, Robert Burt, Martin Chamberlain, Jim Creighton, Jack James, Samantha Lavender, Liam McKenna, Charles Millham, David Weston.

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