A dull production is enlivened only by a line-up of strapping male physiques Troilus and Cressida Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Ultimately, the walls of Troy doomed the Trojans. And they might do the same for Peter Stein's Troilus and Cressida, which has opened in Stratford after a bumpy ride at the Edinburgh Festival. A problem with the huge metal wall representing Ilium forced the early closure of press night in Edinburgh and it has not yet been solved.

After a 20-minute wait, and apologies from the stage manager, the play began, at which point everything got a lot better. Troilus and Cressida is a meaty epic that has to cope with a large cast of Homeric characters. To help us out, Stein has come up with a corking visual device.

The Greeks (apart from the gay icon Patroclus, a perfectly honed, powdered and bejewelled Oliver Kieran-Jones) are old, fat and unhealthily white. Seven years besieging Troy has had ruinous effects on the physique. Long cloaks mask paunches strapped up in corsets. Nestor (John Franklyn-Robbins) is on his last gammy legs, while Menelaus (John Kane) is a dead ringer for Jack Hargreaves from How. They may be clever-clogses - David Yelland's Ulysses, who scythes through the nightmare Stratford acoustic with utterly perfect diction, is a walking brain - but they've let themselves go. The scatological Thersites (Ian Hughes) is their ideal mascot: dirty, but wittily cynical.

The Trojans, on the other hand, look as if they have just stepped out of Men's Health: golden of skin, six of pack, tight of buttock. Oh yes. Envisage a leather jockstrap, sprayed gold. This is what Richard Clothier, playing the warrior Hector, wears for a costume. And (interested parties, please note) he has three brothers; Paris, Troilus and Margarelon, all of whom are similarly non-clad. Apparently the costume designer, Anna Maria Heinreich, waved one of these codpieces in front of the Trojans six months ago. Understandably, they all charged off to the gym.

Yet even such visions of masculine perfection cannot disguise that Troilus and Cressida is rather long on jaw-jaw. Stein may be master of the company drama, but he cannot undo the tedium of the first half, where the action flips between conversations in the warring camps. Everything has ground to a halt, with "pelting wars" rather than manly battles, because the Greeks' principal commander, Achilles, is sulking in his tent with his lover Patroclus.

Against this we have the adolescent Troilus, who has been matched up with the beautiful (but rather common) Cressida by her oleaginous uncle Pandarus, played by Paul Jesson. Their get-together, and Cressida's subsequent betrayal, should provide the emotional heart of the piece. Yet Troilus (Henry Pettigrew) and Cressida (Annabel Scholey) are fey rather than sincere, and unconvincing in their carnal appreciation of each other. Scholey certainly has appeal, in a Charlotte Church-like manner, but her love for Troilus seems weedy compared to the passion of Paris for Menelaus's wife, Helen, whose only scene together is staged in a giant, suspended bed.

The face that launched a thousand ships and her Trojan abductor can't keep their hands off one another. It is rather appropriate when the ghastly Pandarus joins them and the action segues into a faux-orgasm, in the style of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. No wonder Paris (Adam Levy) doesn't have time to fight. And no wonder Helen (Rachel Pickup) wants to stay in Troy. Go back to Greece with Jack Hargreaves? Not likely.

But as Pandarus predicts, "This love will undo us all." No amount of Trojan brawn can escape the fact that the Greeks are wily old things, and once Achilles, stockily played by Vincent Regan in a dressing gown, appears in vengeful fury after Patroclus is slain, the hunks don't stand a chance.

Am I focusing overly on the array of testosterone-fuelled frames currently stalking the Royal Shakespeare Theatre? If so, it's a reflection of the production, which is concerned far more with the political fortunes of a grand parade of glittering warriors than with the adolescent trifling of the eponymous pair.

The Shakespeare Complete Works season continues until April 2007. For booking visit www.rsc.org.uk

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