Theatre: Work in progress

Colin Murphy is unsatisfied with but nonetheless intrigued by Timon of Athens, a play performed by professional actors and members of the homeless community

Timon of Athens presented by Cardboard Citizens (with the RSC) as part of the Belfast Festival. www.cardboard citizens.org.uk. Run finished

Jo, whom I've never met before, bounces over in her sharp suit and runners. "Hey, Colin, you're a journalist, cool," she says. She knows this because it's written on the badge I'm wearing, alongside a colour-coded sticker telling her my approximate salary.

This is the opening of Timon of Athens, a lesser-known, possibly unfinished play by William Shakespeare, in a co-production by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company working with homeless people.

It isn't, as you'll have gathered, entirely conventional.

The show opens as a management seminar in the draughty foyer of Belfast's Waterfront Hall (as part of the Belfast Festival), with a bunch of slickly-suited "trainers" circulating and networking.

Then it moves into the studio theatre (itself more of a conference centre) where the action on stage segues between scenes from Timon of Athens and bursts of frenzied motivational speaking, interlaced with "inspirational" personal testimonies, some of which are in foreign languages.

The play starts out with the audience in that slightly giddy mood that results from everyone knowing each other's names and how much they earn. Three hours later, there's not much giddiness left.

There are great ideas, some very clever imagery, a super lead performance by Simeon Moore as Timon, and provocative personal testimony of homelessness, exile and return. But the production is bedeviled by the choice of an obscure Shakespearian text as its bedrock and by the decision to play the text in something approaching full length.

Timon is a very wealthy, and very innocent, lord of Athens. He gives all his wealth away as presents and bankrupts himself. When he calls on his friends to help him out, they turn their backs. He gets a bit upset and invites them all to a party, at which he serves them faeces and then wrecks the joint. He then takes himself off into the woods, where he finds a cave and settles down as a misanthropic, half-naked hermit, and eventually dies.

By the end, it is over two hours since there has been any reference to our name badges, the focus of so much energy at the outset. The seminar-style interludes are also left behind, replaced in the second half by two sequences of documentary footage, each a study of an individual case of self-exile.

The cast is composed of professional actors and those who have been recruited through work with the company's constituency – homeless people, refugees and asylum seekers. Their energy is great, but their clarity often isn't. The production seems like a work-in-progress, a frenetic jumble of theatrical conceits, socio-political ideas and individual testimonies – a very democratic sort of play.

It is, it seems, more about process than product – more about working with, and for, their constituency, using Timon as a tool, than about staging a Shakespearean play for the delectation of a festival audience in Belfast's Waterfront.

Yet there is a core insight that sears through the three hours: that society is corrupt and self-exile from that society can be a legitimate (if self-destructive) response to that corruption.

The integrity of Moore's performance as Timon and the authenticity of the documentary footage and testimonies defy the indulgent incoherence of much of the production.

The product is unsatisfying, but it's also quite remarkable.