The Trojan Women, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, review At the Gate, Notting Hill, Christopher Haydon, recently installed as artistic director, gets full marks for trying. His version of Euripides" enduring anti-war play does away with reverence, rips up the rulebook. Some of the liberties taken at the National in 2007 by Katie Mitchell's Women of Troy, which punctuated the nerve-jangled action with much jittery dancing, look mild in comparison with the strenuously larky approach here. Haydon and writer Caroline Bird have hacked about as though their lives depended on it, pulling out entrails of modern gallows humour from this ancient tragedy in which representative figures of the captive women of Troy prepared to be shipped off as booty by their near-merciless Greek captors. Where Mitchell set the doomsday scenario in a port-side warehouse, Bird - notable as the author of three poetry collections and one of five official poets at the Olympics - locates the action in a maternity unit-cum-detention centre. Did she suck a lot of gas-and-air before penning her free-spirited imaginative response? Hecuba, "a queen without a city," sniffily complains that the air-con is too cold; Greek envoy Talthybius arrives bearing a platter of sandwiches, including egg mayonnaise, we're told; Hector's widow Andromache memorably tells Hecuba to "P*** off with your sagas." All very sit-up-and-listen but the cumulative effect drains the evening of any true sense of the gut-wrenching horror it details. Some of the writing is pin-sharp - "We own the sky you live under," Talthybius, a superbly snide Sam Cox, declares. But when Helen, legendary cause of the strife, insists she's no tart - "I got a first in English literature!" - the verbal shock-tactic sounds glib. The production's big selling-point is the warm-up presence of Tamsin Greig and Roger Lloyd Pack in the pre-recorded cameo roles of Athena and Poseidon, sneering from monitors at mortal travails. It's the contributions of lesser-known actors, though, that give the show its clout. Dearbhla Molloy is fantastic as the care-worn but still combative Hecuba. As the pregnant Chorus, handcuffed to a hospital-bed even when in labour, Lucy Ellinson rivets attention with every eye-roll. And hats off to a versatile and at points nubile Louise Brealey in a triple-rash of roles: Cassandra, Andromache and Helen. Their efforts aren't in vain but if it checked its own wayward impulses, this valid experiment would run less risk of throwing the baby of pathos out with the bathwater of slavish conformity. Until Dec 15. Tickets: 020 7229 0706; gatetheatre.co.uk