Three parts comedy, one part tragedy

Imagine a terrible war that turns out to have been fought for nothing. Unthinkable, I know, but have a go. Imagine, say, America losing in Vietnam and discovering not only that no more dominoes fell, but that in 15 years the Soviet Union itself would fall, and in a westerly direction. Imagine waging a war in Iraq to secure its weapons of mass destruction and finding out that, er, there weren't any. Euripides, feeding off a nicely fostered rumour in Egypt that Helen of Troy had seen out the Trojan war there, was ahead of you.

In his reworking of the greatest of all classical legends, Helen never did cop off with Paris. He had instead fallen in love with a simulacrum - something rather like a cross between a clone and a blow-up doll. The real Helen was transported to the safety of Egypt by Zeus's airborne son Hermes. Not being a Greek scholar, I am not sure if Euripides's Helen is a great play, but you have got to admit that it is a great, transgressive myth.

Under the direction of Deborah Bruce, Frank McGuinness's freely adapted version is, if you will forgive me, a little hit and myth. The playwright's instinct, as given rein in his versions of Electra and Oedipus, is to write in the modern vernacular, and it serves him well here in a play that is three parts comedy to one part tragedy. Sometimes the clichés even seem fresh-minted for the occasion. Menelaus, Helen's husband, washed up by chance in Egypt after a long voyage home for Troy, speaks of having been through hell and high water. Just so. McGuinness's dialogue between the reunited husband and wife - a 17-year absence that has made their hearts grow fonder - sizzles with playfulness. "Your wife is opening her arms," she tells the shell-shocked Menelaus. "So why aren't you running into them?"

A little later, as they subside into what one imagines was their original, bantering relationship, he whines: "For you I burned Troy to the ground." "Good for you," Helen replies sarcastically. But the next moment they are snogging. Helen here is tonnes more interesting a woman than you thought, her cleverness integral to her sexiness. She is played superbly by Penny Downie, who lays down a hefty deposit on a future casting as Cleopatra. Rushing through the groundlings on to the stage and up a ladder at its side, she starts by announcing: "I am Helen of Egypt." She gets another big laugh by declaring resentfully that "Zeus did it with my darling mother - as a swan". Others may suffer, but at least they weren't hatched out of an egg, she later complains. Paul McGann as Menelaus, the exhausted, battle-weary soldier, can hardly match Downie's dazzle, but he helps generate the sexual charge between them. When she describes his smell in the bath, it is plausibly erotic.

McGuinness and his director are less good, however, at attacking the play's bleaker themes. I had a feeling that our hearts should be breaking when an old soldier, seeing the prize he thought he had guarded alive and well in Egypt, realises that he has fought and lost his comrades for nothing. But our hearts do not break, and it was during such moments that I became aware of the crowd in the pit popping out for more beer, or complaining to the ushers they felt faint. The Globe's is a tough, touristy audience.

In an effort to get the groundlings back in the palm of her hand, Bruce allows her direction to get broader and broader as the evening progresses. Rawiri Paratene as Theoclymenes, the Egyptian king who falls for Helen, is trussed up to look like a panto pharaoh. A countertenor, dressed in a white dinner jacket, trills away like a singing waiter. The white-overalled painters and decorators who make way for the players at the beginning of the evening reappear at the end, adorned with swans' wings to represent Helen's celestial brothers Castor and Pollux. By curtain call, the Greek chorus has turned into an all-singing, all-dancing West End chorus line.

The deaths in this play may happen offstage and before the action starts, but they should, surely, still frame it. In this spirited production, the love story endures, but the satire becomes a romp. I am not convinced that Yeats's shudder in the loins was intended, even by Euripides, to engender this particular, raucous night at the Globe.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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