Shakespeare’s sleaze-infested Vienna isn’t much in evidence either, despite a promising start, with dance music thumping insistently through the walls of Duke Vincentio’s swanky office (discreetly adorned with images of impeccably classical sexual violence). Trevor Cooper’s unrepentant bruiser of a Pompey radiates enough deceptively genial crookedness to lead a whole city into sin. But his claim that the prison is full of his old punters resounds hollowly, with only a sad (short) parade of girls wrapped in blankets to testify to the success of Angelo’s hard-line ethical crusade.

Within these limits, there’s some fine and intelligent acting on display. Rory Kinnear contrives to make Angelo perversely loveable in his flustered, fumbling attempt at a seduction. Anna Maxwell Martin, by contrast, doesn’t hesitate to let us see the self-righteous fury that fuels Isabella’s principled resistance to his sexual advances. Trying to untangle the ensuing complications, Ben Miles’ Duke is a compelling (and occasionally infuriating) portrait of liberal decency bedevilled by self-doubt; a good man failing to negotiate an accommodation between other people’s destructive certainties.

Making the case for tolerance, Lloyd Hutchinson as Lucio is a smooth-talking swaggerer, unprincipled, unheroic and eminently disarming, ducking niftily round corners to elude the unwelcome attentions of the law. And David Annen’s Provost is a beacon of battered integrity – painstaking, exhausted and doggedly humane.

With a company so gifted, it’s a shame that its members never quite cohere into a united dramatic ensemble. And once we’re in among the twists and turns of one of Shakespeare’s more tortuous final acts, the drama’s main players gaze at one another like strangers. Mutely uncomprehending, mutually accusing, they’re each wrapped-up in their own private martyrdom. And the resulting stalemate denies the audience any shred of optimism or comfort.

Whether or not a West end production would utilise the technique’s full dramatic potential, chances are it would have the budget to overcome some of the technical issues that blight the Almeida’s production, Slung Low’s Last Seen.

The company use chunky ear-defender type radio ‘phones and miked-up actors to ensure that even those in the audience who can’t see the action can at least hear every nuance of the dialogue. A sound tech accompanies the procession around the streets of Islington, armed with a bulky backpack that broadcasts incidental music and sound effects to accentuate the actors’ voices or underscore silent sequences. The technology vastly improves the outdoor promenade format, helping maintain an atmosphere that could otherwise easily be shattered by background noise.

There are three routes, and each audience member only gets to see one, but occasionally you can catch glimpses of set pieces not intended for you: a fully laid dinner table through a park gate is a reminder that the stories you see are never the entirety of what the city has to tell. Every passer-by wearing headphones or a hands-free set feels like they could potentially be a player. Though all you ever do is follow and listen, there’s an exciting sense of exploration and discovery without the attendant dangers of the unknown.

But – and though it most probably isn’t the company’s fault, it’s still a big but – the headphones pick up interference far too easily. Some of the dialogue sinks under waves of static, which can be physically painful on the ear, and the music under one potentially very poignant moment has to share the airwaves with a local pirate radio station broadcasting from a nearby window.

The technology is simultaneously the best and worst aspect of Last Seen. Without it, the production would be at best pedestrian and at worst inaudible. Because of it, the production will be discussed more for its technical flaws than for its dramatic merit (as I’ve demonstrated). What the production definitely is, though, is a glimpse of how the technology could positively impact theatre, whether as a dramatic technique in itself or as a facilitatory tool, once its shortcomings are ironed out. The theatre world might just have to wait until the technology catches up to its vision.

The play opens with a strange whirling cacophony in darkness. From the darkness appears Judas’ mother, lamenting the fate of her sons. With fitting liturgical resonance, her lament grieves the two thousand years of suffering endured by her sons; and yet the scene is not without a touch of irony: it is precisely this declamation of pain, this self-composure, which brings her close to the very Church that has condemned her sons. Amanda Boxer’s sensual, husky voice underpins her monologue with a hint of suppressed emotion, strong enough to prevent it erring on the side of the mundane. There are other moments of subtle strength in the play – the silent face-offs between Judas (Joseph Mawle) and Jesus (Edward Hogg) for example; and Mawle’s masterful facial expressions that convey a sense of suffering beyond words.

But whilst there are ups, there are also some downs. Guirgis is too enamoured with his own snazziness, launching one punch line after another. All the characters in the play are potential joke fodder, laughable to the audience but also to each other. I fail to see, for example, the relevance in basing so many figures on variations of a stereotypical gangster rapper: Saint Monica, Pontius Pilate, Simon the Zealot, Gloria. The tendency towards stereotyping in this play allows for little audience connection with the characters, save perhaps for Gawn Grainger’s superb portrayal of Caiaphas. Caiaphas’ refusal to be defended and granted forgiveness raises the question about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity – a question that is more pertinent than ever since the Pope’s reintroduction of the prayer for the Jews into Catholic mass. But Caiaphas aside, the only excuse the author has for this general one-dimensionality, as far as I can see, is the fact that it serves as a juxtaposiation to the equally one-dimensional holiness (or evilness) of the biblical characters.

In any case, the evening felt too long. It was fun watching a typical American TV courtroom drama, but the whole situation was exploited too much for its punch lines. Towards the end, when Satan enters for the second time, I was longing for some sort of closure. And even when it came, it came in two parts. First, there was a very interesting argument between Jesus and Judas (the only verbal enounter we ever see between the two), in which the play manages to hover ambiguously above the pros and cons of Judas’ case. It challenges both an outright rejection of God’s damnation of Judas as well as an overly subtle theological argument in its favour. This is then followed by Butch Honeywell’s monologue (played by Shane Attwooll), whose connection to the rest of the play is tentative at best.

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot could make a good TV sitcom, but it fails to rise to the interpersonal demands of the stage.