A plague of opinion (T&C III,iii)

There's a DIY bug in the water this week. Not content with stage dressing, designers seem set upon also refashioning entire auditoria.

Earlier in the year we saw the bland mish mash of pseudo southern bricabrac sprawling from the stage past the sleeping spectators in the New London for "Gone With The Wind", just as Christopher Oram's courtroom extended around the Donmar circle for "Parade".

Now, at the Barbican Theatre the entire front of house is abandoned and tiered seating placed on either side of a performance space for Cheek by Jowl's "Troilus and Cressida". In terms of the usual layout this traverse is created upon a newly constructed thrust stage poking out of the proscenium arch, the seats in the circles and balcony can be seen dimly abandoned, and audience members are given the unusual opportunity to peer up through machinery into the fly tower. What set there was consisted only of rolls of cloth sloping at one end as if to suggest the Greeks' tents, rolling under foot and rising vertically at the other end as the walls of Troy.

Meanwhile across town in a famously versatile venue, The Young Vic, audience members who choose to see "The Good Soul of Szechwan" are directed around a warren of corridors before entering the auditorium and then find themselves entering the theatre across the stage, upon which anonymous Chinese workers are labouring. Again here, the usual seating is dispensed with in favour of bare plywood flooring and walls and plastic bucket seating, surrounded by authentic street paraphernalia. Pounding, repetitive sounds and mechanised movements invoke in the audience a heaviness and claustrophobia before any of the adapted Brechtian parable is presented.

It did make me wonder why these companies bothered using the Barbican or the Young Vic. Why not go the whole hog and chose another space - the "Mask of the Red Death" has recently done so at BAC, and Shunt Vaults is often host to site-specific work.

But what of the productions themselves?

"Troilus and Cressida" was a joy. A lengthy Shakespearean stab at a tale peripheral to the Trojan War, I was unfamiliar with the central characters, their foibles and their sorrows. Here they were played by Alex Waldmann, as a youthful, puckish Troilus, irritatingly darting around the stage in adolescent lust, and Lucy Briggs Owen, in a fairly forgettable performance. It was impossible to believe there was any shared ancestry between Troilus and his lythe warrior brother Hector.

Pandarus panders to the children's amours, pimping his neice to the Trojan prince. Here David Collings is dandyish and loveable, which belies the underlying stagnancy of his lecherous nature, and when this darker persona is revealed in his final speech ("bone-ache" and "disease") it comes as rather a surprise.

Meanwhile the modern take in this production is the leather clad queeniness of Achilles, coupled with the brummie-spouting bitterness of his slave in a dragged-up Thersites (David Caves), narrating and entertaining the assembled Greek troops caustically as a cabaret act in a provincial gay club, inspiring through wine and song, mortal enemies to embrace before battle.

The central characters of the War itself, are Helen and Paris, whose relationship launched the Greek ships in the first place. Here Director Declan Donnellan and Designer Nick Omerod remind us of this fact with the repeated appearance of Helen (Marianne Oldham), ravishing the audience and on-stage paparazzi alike in her full length ballgown. Her Paris (Oliver Coleman), alas, can't act, and is given a wig so laughable that it might belong to a mannequin. However, his preening coupled with her beauty give the glamourous air of a footballer and his WAG.

Coincidentally, as Menelaus Coleman was more bearable. Of the other characters Ulysees (Ryan Kiggell) deserves mention for his demonstration of calm and reserve throughout except for his deliberately disturbing depiction of a dog begging for a kiss from Cressida.

Over in the Young Vic, a youthful cast, most of whom I hadn't seen before, provided the backdrop to Jane Horrocks' fascinatingly split Good Soul, struggling with the weight of the Gods' expectations.

She has an understandably difficult choice between loving and rejecting the handsome yet seedy Yang Sun (John Marquez) whilst being pursued by Wang, played by Aian Gillan.

I found Gillan to be appalling, irritating, childlike and at times occasionally parodying a Chinese accent to an almost racist extreme. His histrionic performance stood out among other entertainingly eccentric characters, as one I'd happily never see again.

The rub in this new translation by David Harrower, I read in the programme later, was that Brecht's play as previously performed relies upon his lead character entering the ethically dubious tobacco industry; this is a translation of one of his later, but previously unpublished, versions in which the industry is heroin and Yang Sun's decline is into addiction.

Presented in brief scenes, with caricatured protagonists and musical interludes, set in the surreal surroundings of a Chinese factory, this was a treat and a fascinating examination of a split soul.

When I'm next likely to see either of these plays, I'm not sure, but after two surprising presentations, I wonder if I'll be bored by more straight performances...