Make love, not war – this is surely the banner headline of Troilus and Cressida, a play whose cynical deconstruction of war and battlefield heroics frames one of Shakespeare’s most tender and painfully abortive romances.

Joining Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It, Troilus is the latest and least familiar play in the Globe’s ‘Young Hearts’ season. It would be hard to get much younger than the adolescent lovers and warriors of Matthew Dunster’s production, whose gelled hairstyles and petulant posturings seem more the preserve of the playground than the battlefield; if the Iliad were peopled with the cast of Hollyoaks this would be the result.

The emphasis on youth does, however, make real sense of much of the tonal unevenness of a play that lurches from fairly crude comedy to tragedy, mirroring the passions and extremes of its teenage heroes who are, after all, several years into a war over someone nicking somebody else’s woman.

At the centre of the play’s domestic drama is Pandarus, Cressida’s uncle and the architect of her doomed romance. A difficult balance between exuberant naivety and crude worldliness, he is the play’s most complex character, and in Matthew Kelly’s hands proved both engagingly human and convincingly flawed. His comedic energy was more than matched by Laura Pyper’s pertly charming Cressida, and their quick-fire dialogue was a delight – a foil to her more emotionally charged encounters with Troilus (Paul Stocker).

Among the Greek camp there were strong performances from Trystan Gravelle – all mascara and languid smouldering – as a Jim Morrison-esque Achilles, and some well-judged comedy from Chinna Wodu as muscle-man Ajax. Of the Trojans it was Christopher Colquhoun’s beautifully delivered Hector that shone, bringing a clarity and real poise to this small but crucial role.

Conceptually it’s hard to fault Dunster’s vision of the play, but unfortunately the practical results somehow fail to satisfy. The spectacle of the show is pure Globe – sandal-shod, sword-wielding men and diaphanously draped women – yet in all other aspects the tone of the piece is aggressively contemporary, from its diaspora of northern accents to the pop-culture mincings of the various (and plentiful) gay characters. The result jars, and not in a productively post-modern sort of way.

This is potentially an excellent production, but seems to sit uncomfortably in the style and space of the Globe. Freed from the particular constraints of this venue, it could embrace its modern reading more fully and bring greater conviction to this awkwardly beautiful love story.

Performances continue until September 20. Box office: telephone 020 7401 9919 (www.shakespeares-globe.org).