It is only early March, but I am fairly sure I have found a contender for worst play of the year already.

We almost left at the interval as some of the audience had; the reason we did not is that we the play was unknown to us and wanted to learn what happens. Turns out, there is a good reason why we had not known the story  –  it is not Mr Shakespeare’s finest hour (or three) – it felt like a half-baked version of “All’s well that ends well”, minus the nuance and disturbing undertones. And given we had only recently seen the latter at the Sam Wanamaker, this only served to emphasise not just the shortcomings and incongruity of the play, but also the mediocracy of its staging.

Things did not get off to a good start – with two actors unwell and no understudies, two roles were read-in, including Cymbeline (with the reader not fully understanding what the lines meant) and Iachimo (who did a decent job, although soliciting laughs at inopportune moments e.g., as the script had to be handed to him in the middle of a fight.)

Two folk dressed in black sweatpants and Ts reading their lines created the sense of an amateur troupe, but if everything else was perfect, I am sure things could have worked out. Unfortunately, other than Innogen, the players were, putting it bluntly, not very accomplished. They were for ever shouting – the entire play seemed to have pretty much one level of emotion – highly elevated – making it draining to watch. They also seemed to constantly run around the stage with very little interaction with one another – almost as if the were on stage by themselves. The absolute lack of any stage back drop or props made it feel like an early rehearsal at a poorly funded high school. The one stand out was the creation of the bed with drapes suspended from the candle lit chandelier  – something I would not have given much notice in other circumstances.

There were some peculiar interpretations  –  the female twin spoke in a strong Yorkshire accent, seemingly to help the audience differentiate from the player’s other role of Lady Helen. Her twin brother whom she was exclusively raised with, and her pretend mother, did not however speak that way. Presumably poor Aviraga was sent somewhere further North all by herself for the best part of her childhood. This clearly impacted on her development, as the 20-something-year old character behaved like a 13-year-old, which stood out oddly compared to the much more mature brother.

The costumes were also a work of wonder – some characters wore ‘garb’ that I can only assume was supposed evoke the period of the play (times of Julius Ceaser), some wore military attire reminiscent of portraits of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and then all of a sudden there was a modern puffer jacket thrown into the mix.

This utter lack of cohesiveness was amplified by the sex changes. If you want a “gender-balanced cast”, a simple option is to have women play some of the male parts. If you are going to change the sex of the roles, not only do you need a solid reason for doing so, you also need to carefully think through the consequences and make sure you pull the changes through in all places not just the obvious ones (e.g., the lesbian princess should not be referencing “another man”). Cymbeline being female was neither here nor there, and a bit hard to judge what this could have meant if the character had not been read-in. It does however make the recounting of the “Duke” dying and confessing that he never loved his queen come across completely incredulous. But making Posthumus female and turning the central love relationship of the play into a gay one was not just pointless but also poorly executed. There was no meaning added by this change and no apparent impact on the plot. In the recent “All’s Well” adding the gay dynamic was also somewhat problematic, but it had some interesting undertones to it. Here, it lacked any such exploration and in fact created serious credibility issues for the plot. Why would Iachomo ever think wager on seducing a lesbian? How could Innogen possibly not recognise that the headless corpse next to her was male, even if wearing her wife’s clothes? And don’t get me started on how those clothes could ever fit Cloten in the first place.

But I left the worst till last – the percussion ensemble. Three ladies dedicated to making the experience truly unforgettable. Scraping on the cello, whacking guitar strings with a spoon, playing on water glasses and knocking stones together. All of this accompanied by strange vocal cries. Most of the time, the noise was so unbearable I had to block my ears. Most of the time, the cacophony was drowning out the poor elocution of the players.

By the end, I was exhausted. For three hours (and believe me, there were plenty of scenes that could have been slimmed down, and scenes, like the burial, that were unnecessarily padded out), I had been straining to understand what the players were saying, getting slightly confused because of all the sex changes, feeling uncomfortable on the narrow wooden benches and getting a splitting headache from the excruciating percussion.

Trying to find anything positive to say about this performance really requires scraping the bottom of the barrel, a sound that the ensemble should have possibly considered in its repertoire. If this had been an episode of the Apprentice, I would have asked for a full refund.