All the signs are that 2015 will have been a vintage year for dramatic versions of ancient Greek tales. Well, all the signs except one. Marina Carr’s Hecuba is not in fact an adaptation of a Greek play, unlike the clutch of Oresteias, Medeas and the like which form the rest of the current crop. Carr has used the Athenian dramatist Euripides’ play centring on Hecuba, queen of Troy, together with Homer’s Iliad, the historian Herodotus and her own imagination to create a new perspective on how the victorious Greeks after the Trojan War set about not simply subjugating the Trojans but virtually exterminating their royal family. Of Hecuba’s three surviving children, her youngest son Polydorus is killed lest he grow up to seek revenge and her daughter Polixena sacrificed to bring fair winds to the Greek fleet on its voyage home.

The piece is dyed fast in the colours of Greek drama. Both Carr’s writing and Erica Whyman’s staging are steeped in the kind of formalism which underpins such tragedies. The script contains little interaction between the figures onstage; Hecuba, the Greek commander Agamemnon and others principally deliver an intercut narrative, as it were offering testimony to the events. But where we can see, for instance, a genuine civic debate going on through the ritual in the Oresteia just transferred into London’s West End, or the paradoxical combination of discipline and ecstasy demanded by the gods in its successor production Bakkhai at the Almeida, Whyman’s cast seem to be being ritualistic because it’s what is demanded. Carr’s prose, too, begins with an intense, grim poeticism, but as the 105 minutes progress her stylistic ear turns to tin: this unyielding poetical flintiness clashes repeatedly with bathetic black humour both intentional and un-, and with phrases of dull modern stodge. This is neither eclecticism nor synthesis, it’s a hotch-potch.

Derbhle Crotty and Ray Fearon are first-rate actors, but as Hecuba and Agamemnon they’re asked to pull out all the stops from the off, leaving them nowhere to go and our attention nowhere to stay. This play could have moved fascinatingly on from the original Greek material, but instead it contemplates its own navel and trips over its own feet.

Written for the Financial Times.