So you have to salute his courage in choosing to launch the National Theatre's new ensemble company in the wide open spaces of the Olivier, with perhaps the most dense and difficult play that Shakespeare ever wrote.

I have one main criticism. At three hours 40 minutes the show is too long, and Nunn is beginning to look dangerously addicted to long-windedness. But it's tremendous to see the dark, knotty drama presented with such illuminating clarity, and Nunn achieves a virtuosic blend of intimate detail and epic sweep.

Scholars are divided on whether Troilus and Cressida was ever performed in Shakespeare's lifetime. What's in no doubt is that the play has found its time now, speaking directly to audiences with its cynical debunking of heroes, its rancid sexuality, and its overriding sense of despair.

In Rob Howell's simple, striking design, the action is starkly staged on a circle of red, stony earth, with a backdrop of the walls of Troy, whose gates swing open to send impressive numbers of sword brandishing soldiery out for exciting battles. The costumes are traditional, straight out of Puffin's Tales of Troy in fact, and Nunn stages the war on racial lines - the divided, calculating Greeks are white, most of the fiercely tribal Trojans are black.

It is the vile choric commentator Thersites who best summarises the theme of the play as war and lechery, but in the early stages Nunn does allow the lovers an almost Chaucerian glow of romance. Peter de Jersey is a handsome, smitten Troilus, while Sophie Okonedo somehow contrives to be both sexually knowing and touchingly vulnerable as Cressida. Yet even the early courtship is contaminated by the cynical spirit of David Bamber's hilariously effete and fluttery Pandarus, who clearly has the hots for Troilus and can hardly keep his constantly wandering hands off the dear boy.

It's a great comic performance with echoes of both Frankie Howerd and John Inman, and as a result the viciousness at the end, when Pandarus turns hatefully upon Cressida before bequeathing the audience his mortal diseases, seems particularly shocking.

What's especially welcome is the depth and detail of many of the performances, boding well for the future of the ensemble. Okonedo, for instance, memorably captures the complexity of Cressida; yes, she's faithless, but in the production's most shocking scene she is all but gang-raped by the Greek generals. Okonedo harrowingly captures the weariness and the sexual disgust of a woman who is forced to turn tricks to survive.

Among the Greeks, Roger Allam shines as a superbly intelligent and witty Ulysses, delivering the great speeches about degree and time with dramatic clarity, and revealing a keen sense of ironic intelligence.

Jasper Britton is a notably repellent Thersites, covered in sores and, in a brilliantly revealing detail, masturbating with Cressida's glove. Yet in this devious world there is something shockingly admirable about his reckless, reductive honesty.

Raymond Coulthard, in pop star's eye make-up, stylishly captures both the posturing vanity and the bisexuality of Achilles, and there's fine work too from Simon Day as a deliciously dim Ajax and David Burt as the constantly mocked, permanently aggrieved cuckold Menelaus.

Throughout Nunn and his excellent ensemble are alert to the sour, sardonic humour of the play. As a result the audience laughs and giggles its way into the heart of a moral wasteland, a disconcerting experience that is absolutely true to the spirit of the play.

"...Nunn's magnificent new production of Troilus And Cressida in a revamped Olivier is a breakthrough. Not only because it signals the creation of an ensemble and casts the Trojans as black and the Greeks as white. It completes a process that has been gathering force for years: the reclamation of Cressida as a genuine tragic character... The stress is on narrative clarity. Nunn's great virtue is that he re-creates the play by re-defining character. Instead of simply opposing romantic Trojans and pragmatic Greeks, he implies that the former are weighed down by a doomed paternalism and the latter by a warring individualism... On the Greek side, the outstanding performance comes from Roger Allam as Ulysses - the best since Eric Porter. Instead of a patrician wiseacre, Allam offers us a flawed ironist who relishes his power. He is superb in the scene where Ajax is boosted as the Greek champion, comparing him to 'bull-bearing Milo' with almost lascivious sarcasm. And the great speech beginning 'Time hath my lord a wallet at his back' - which really says you're only as good as your last picture - is a classic example of how dense imagery can be unlocked through manual and verbal emphasis... Nunn's psychological questing pays rich dividends throughout. Dhobi Oparei's Hector is not so much a chivalric warrior as a force of nature encased in self-regard. And Jasper Britton's Thersites, looking like a badly plucked cockatoo, is less the author's spokesman than a man whose own diseased cynicism leads him to spit on and then loot Patroclus's corpse. Admittedly the Achilles is underpowered and David Bamber's Pandarus is not much more than voyeuristic queen. But Nunn's production makes exciting use of the space and unites intimate detail and symbolic gesture. When Greeks and Trojans freeze envisaging the future, it is both a startling echo of a device Nunn first used in Julius Caesar over a quarter-century ago and a potent reminder that the characters are all prisoners of pitiless time."

"... The National Theatre's new production of Troilus, co-directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, would be an important effort for two reasons even if it failed. One: this launches, within the National, a repertory company of actors who will tackle six very different works over the coming year. Two: in an era when almost all the most admired Shakespeare productions have been in small spaces, this one is a determined push to make Shakespeare once again work on a large scale. In both respects, mind you, it very nearly does fail. It starts terribly; yet by the end it achieves real victory. The Nunn-Caird production makes Troilus a war of whites (Greeks) versus blacks (Trojans). The whites (dressed in a mixture of Oriental and modern attire) are ruthless schemers; the blacks (in traditional Arab/African dress) are honourable, open-hearted, noble. (Designs are by Rob Howell. His red sand flooring is excellent, his set decent, his ancient-and-modern costumes extremely variable.) Shakespeare, like (curiously) all Greek authors, is certainly sympathetic to the Trojans and critical of the Greeks; but I have never known the scales tipped so firmly in the Trojans' favour as here, and to make it a black-versus-white drama is one more political element than we need. Nunn and Caird have also done some tinkering with the text that sometimes feels like superimposition rather than clarification. Several of the actors are inexperienced in Shakespeare, and there is much too much of the shouting and rushing about that are the wrong methods to succeed in the Olivier Theatre. Bit by bit, however, the best bits of the production coalesce; and (a more telling sign of Nunn's and Caird's achievement) even the weakest performers have moments of memorable humanity and eloquence. David Bamber alone, though one of the most accomplished actors onstage, gives a consistently irritating performance: he smothers the role of Pandarus in a busy display of surface acting that is never for a moment believable. As Cressida, Sophie Okonedo traces a large arc from impish delight, bright-smiling and dimpling, to aimless misery... The finest achievement of the production, however, is - despite what I have said about textual fiddling - the way in which it shows new lights in Shakespeare's play. The word "Time", for example: how, again and again, it beams out, from Ulysses discoursing to Achilles about the changeable reputations of heroes, from the plaints of Cressida and Troilus about their enforced separation, and from Hector speaking to Ulysses and the Greeks about prophecies of Troy's fall. In this Troilus, time moves fast; and its very speed is part of the tragedy."

"Alarm bells should be rung for Trevor Nunn, the National Theatre's director. His production of Shakespeare's darkest problem drama, Troilus and Cressida, launching his new ensemble of actors who will appear in a year-long repertory of plays, ended up last night beached and water-logged on the banks of high hopes. Nunn's daring plan to form a National troupe and test it in the hardest reaches of Shakespeare, will be rightly admired. I have, however, never seen such an arid Nunn production, one which so resembles a denuded hulk, peopled with actors flailing at sea with Shakespeare - not drowning but treading water as they bawlingly pitch into the text and miss. This is far from sinking to the muddy depths of Sean Mathias's 1998 National production of Antony and Cleopatra. But there's small comfort in that. In shafts of dyspeptic satire and cynicism Shakespeare surveys the moral damage done to Greeks and Trojans as they pursue love, honour and glory in a stalemated war. Nunn's own perspective upon this battle of wills and wiles is cosmetically prettified. Rob Howell's design sets a blank scene. It converts the Olivier stage into a bare and circular playing-area and a redshingled floor, with an arc of mobile rear doors behind which lies a stretch of sky-line. There's no useful impression of a country exhausted by war. The predominantly black Trojans and rival Greeks are alike in sheer unwarrior-like demeanour. Muscles and machismo are what most of them lack. Only Dhobi Oparei's Hector, who wears a well-turned scowl, looks as if killing comes naturally to him. Nunn bathes Troilus and Cressida's doomed love affair in the glow of romantic pathos, even bringing the turn-coat girl back at the end like some ghostly icon of lost desire. Unfortunately Sophie Okonedo's white-dressed, unflirtatious Cressida is cucumber cool where she ought to be inviting as a peach. She's unsure whether to be a pliant opportunist or war-casualty. Peter de Jersey's disturbingly breathless Troilus pitches camp in the terrain of fraught self pity and never leaves. Pandarus, the voyeuristic go between is in the hands of David Bamber. And what hands. They wave and gesticulate non-stop as the dressing gowned, Bamber camps and flounces around in a luridly excessive carry-on... I offer one star for braving this classic. But for Nunn and the Nation.

Among the parade of generals on both sides, Troilus and Cressida embark on a doomed love affair. She becomes the pawn of war, soiled goods, an embittered hostage to fortune. And Troilus goes from eager warrior to embattled avenger. On the Olivier stage Trevor Nunn has mounted an epic and impressive revival of a play that more belongs to our century than any other of the Bard's.

A new permanent company bodes well for the coming months...

Trevor Nunn's Troilus and Cressida at the Olivier Theatre, is so good it would be perverse not to give it pride of place... a thrilling production, and one that does justice to so many aspects of a great but difficult play... Nunn gives us a balanced picture. The comic scenes are beautifully handled although the play hurts too much for us to go on laughing once they are over. The philosophical reflections are brought to life as vividly as the fighting. The production marks an auspicious beginning for the National Theatre's new repertory system.