It was an inspired idea to ask Cardboard Citizens, a company that works with and partly consists of the homeless, refugees and asylum seekers, to make this play its contribution to the RSC’s Bardathon. Was there ever so absolute a drop-out as Timon? One moment he’s rich, secure and complacent, and the next he’s living in what here is less a cave than an improvised box: filthy, embittered and ranting.

Adrian Jackson’s production, which I caught at Stratford en route to Belfast and Southampton, has its tricksy aspects. The spectators are given lapel badges on which to write their real or imaginary jobs and incomes and are then treated to the casts’s parody management-speak, full of advice about positive thinking and self-improvement. Yet if this is meant to stick a guilt-trip on us, it’s not wholly miscalculated, for the play that follows might almost be Shakespeare’s attempt to make us feel guilty, though less for being well-fed and decently housed than for belonging to such a vile, ungrateful species as the human.

It’s certainly apt that the revival is rough theatre, and probably apt that some performances are pretty raw. Of the three actors who successively play the title character, Simeon Moore is the most professional and successfully gives us the lavish host and ultra-generous friend as well as the desolate Beckettian misanthrope of the end, but it’s the Albanian Agron Biba who roars and rages with real power. As for the fake feast in which Timon throws water at the flatterers who have refused him aid in his time of need — well, here they’re on the receiving end of urine and dog poo, provoking one of them to emend the scene’s final line to “one day he gives us jewels, the next stools”.

If this Timon has a limitation it’s that, almost inevitably, it comes across far more as a social than as a metaphysical protest play. And this emphasis is intensified by the insertion of what are presumably the actors’ own memories, such as hiding beside a tennis court while oblivious stockbrokers played their game, and bits of film: an old beggar hurried off by cops, a very articulate hermit trying to avoid eviction from his own tiny acre. But would Shakespeare, friend of “poor naked wretches”, have objected? Surely not.

www.cardboardcitizens.org.uk