Best Bard
27 February

Well, I've just seen one of the best theatre shows I've seen in a very long time.

Over the nine years and more that I've been setting my thoughts down on virtual paper, theatre has not fared well in the pantheon of happy events. All in all, there have only been two really major evenings of bliss - a 1998 visit to the Edinburgh Festival which gave me Life is A Dream by Pedro Calderòn and last year's The Mayor of Zalamea also by Calderòn at the Everyman.

Now let's add to this Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare at Theatre Clwyd.

My little poppet pointed out to me that we had seen Troilus together once before at the Barbican. I scorned his memory but I have to acknowledge that he was right. Every so often, he really does surprise me.

I'd woken up on the Saturday morning feeling completely out of sorts and had one of my really crap days. It would have been so easy to capitulate and implode, battening down the hatches against the world outside. The weather reports were against us as well forecasting ice and cold and snow particularly on the Welsh hills.

But Ross and I girded our loins, booked the tickets and headed off into the twilight. I remember from the 1980s how easy we used to think it was to get to Mold for contemporary dance performances at Theatre Clwyd. But I'd forgotten just how easy it really is. And I'd forgotten what a pleasant venue it is.

The play is a strange affair. It's likely that it was written and produced for a private audience of undergraduates in the legal profession - an educated audience and one that would understand the ways in which the text plays with legend and with, I think, Shakespeare's own works.

Time, love and honour are prevalent themes throughout his life. Romeo and Juliet was up together to the sound of nightingales and larks. Troilus and Cressida wake up to larks and crows. Henry V dispatches his enemies with honour and remembers the dead. Achilles and his Myrmidons hack down an unarmed Hector away from the scene of battle.

The whole presentation was spare, lithe and to the point. The stage setting was three slightly curved floor areas that could have been shards of pottery, could have been mosaics. Props were minimal and telling. Costumes were a blend of attic and modern military for the Greeks and more colourful and gleaming and oriental for the Trojans.

Characterisations were apt and immediately drawn by tone of voice and body language. Unlike the cast of Dr Faustus, this cast knew how to speak verse. Speech after speech came over as if newly minted.

There were many directorial ideas that I loved.

• Cressida's welcome into the Greek camp through kisses from the generals became an initiation of torture with the kisses forced on her - it was properly awful to watch
• Achilles invitation to Hector to join him and Patroclus in their tent was a siren song of lust that was willingly accepted
• Pandarus's final speech was not the angry rant I have always expected but the dessicated, despairing warning of a dying man

It was just so exciting to be watching theatre of this intelligence, grappling with a difficult and sometimes intractable play and making it understandable and enjoyable.

There were all sorts of felicities in the ensemble. In no particular order, I liked

• Ben Fox's Thersites - a sort of cross between Baldrick and Gollum, a damaged, knowing child of a fool
• Johnson Willis's camp Pandarus - a bitchy, queeny creation that was ultimately moving in its diseased decline
• Leila Crerar's flighty Cressida - her emotions twisting and turning all over the place
• Jenny Livsey's imperious Cassandra - a true hysteric whose prophesies are ignored
• Simon Armstrong's real politik Ulysses with a fine eye for the main chance
• Gerrard Murphy's bold and brash Achilles - truly in love with Patrocolus and daring to be corpulently Bacchanalian
• Daniel Llewelyn-Williams' toothsome Patroclus - you could understand why Achilles fancied him
• Adrian Bouchet's preening Hector - a hero who knows it and is as much in love with himself as his own myth
• Daniel Hawksford's callow Troilus - a nothing of a part that needs to be so for the rest of the play to revolve around his juvenile passions
• Dyfrig Morris's bull-boy Ajax - an oaf who is manipulated by his elders for their own purposes
• John Cording's Nestor - an aged boor played with an exceptional humanity that still left him as a loathsome character

And I've mentioned less that half of a cast that didn't put a foot wrong all evening.

Outstanding, absolutely outstanding.