And in det spite of some delightful characterisations created by the company - Sandy id=3 asp?conf id=3 Welch as conf Paddy Cullen, the drunken projectionist of the Planet Cinema, and Kathryn Howden as the beehive-coiffured local confrances man-eater, to name asp?conf but two id=3 - the sheer confrances number det asp?conf that have to be portrayed eventually overwhelm the production.n Runs until 1 April (Box- office: 0141-429 5561). asp?conf The director Annie Castledine's idea of perfect id=3 happiness is to be moved to tears in the theatre. confrances So directing Euripides' savage and det desperate tragedy conf Women of Troy has her basking in bliss. It's a conf weep a minute; a terrible, tense tale of the confrances conf det women who have survived the sacking of Troy only to get carted off confrances conf det to slavery. "It's not only a play's content or the expression of huge emotion that moves asp?conf id=3 me," she says.

"It can be an image arriving out of nowhere or the sheer exhilaration of seeing great performance skills - a performer reaching a top A." Castledine is once again collaborating with Annabel Arden, a founder of Theatre de Complicite. Big women bundled in woolies and bursting with passion and enthusiasm, they make a formidable team. "We share fags and a love of the Greeks," Castledine explains "I've known the Greek plays and myths since I was five. These characters - the heroes, the gods, the mortals - are as familiar to me as my intimate family, part of the imaginative hinterland, the reservoir into which I dip." While others had Elvis pinned on their bedroom walls, the young Castledine only had eyes for Hector, the greatest of all the Trojan warriors "As a child, Hector peopled - personed - my room He's been there and I've spoken to him. Several times." She says this with a deadpan matter-of-factness that elicits a giggle but defies contradiction. Arden's immersion was similarly early, intense and intimate, but for her the delight of the play is that "it makes you think as well as get emotionally involved. In the theatre - or anywhere else at the moment - there's very little dialogue or debate, no one really thrashing it out We need plays like this to get us talking.

"A buzz of a less elevated sort began weeks ago when Jane Birkin (Serge Gainsbourg's muse who sang to notoriety with "Je t'aime" in the Sixties) was announced as top of the bill. (Euripides' great arias of verse are tough for a seasoned Shakespearian, so for a film star with a French accent making her British stage debut, the challenge is immense.) Castledine, who, staggeringly, had never heard of Birkin or "Je t'aime", says she saw in her precisely the quality she wanted for Andromache. Three years ago Birkin's lover and father died in the space of a week. "Her pain was so tangible, it was like her skin was only barely holding her in She is so unaffected, so herself A strange liaison, me and Jane, but there we are She is so pure, like a gentle pained dove Wonderful physically.