First Night: The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Olivier National Theatre, London

Peter Shaffer's 1964 play The Royal Hunt of the Sun was a landmark event in the history of the National Theatre. It was the first new work premiered by the recently formed company. And, unlike most dramas of the period where a trip across the drawing room to the drinks tray was the most arduous trek expected of the characters, this clash-of-civilisations epic sent a battalion of Spanish mercenaries on a stylised ascent of the Andes, junking all the trappings of naturalism and using the stage in the Shakespearean manner as a place where anything can happen by imaginative fiat.

John Dexter's production became an instant legend, employing mime, music and dance in a spectacular feat of "total theatre" that presented the conquest of Peru with a concentrated emblematic power.

Expectations were high for Trevor Nunn's NT revival, which launches this year's Travelex £10 season in the Olivier - not least because the play's topical edge is arguably sharper now than when it was first performed.

Sixteenth-century Spanish imperialism, with greed for gold masquerading as a Christian crusade, offers pointed parallels with the current adventure in Iraq and the violations committed in the name of democracy. These, though, are left frustratingly implicit in a production that is, to be sure, striking but, by and large, embarrassingly old-fashioned in stage-craft and style.

Two cultures - one that emphasises violent competitiveness and suffering; one that values a regimented communal happiness which deprives the individual of choice - are contrasted and equated in this story of how 167 mercenaries managed to conquer an empire of 24 million by capturing its Sun God King.

One problem with Nunn's production is it fails to capture the dialectical nature of the drama. Where the great orb in the original production represented the interaction between the civilisations, with the Spanish rosette and Christian cross exfoliating into a blazing pagan sun, here, more simply, it's a golden shrine for Paterson Joseph's superb Atahuallpa.

Staged on a wooden disc, the revival resorts to tired techniques that make you feel that Complicité and artists such as Robert Lepage might just as well have never existed in the interim between 1964 and now. Like a high-school drama class, the men sway and toil between blue-lit sheets to evoke the slog up the Andean ravines.

Naff strobe-lighting flickers over the resurrecting waves of Incas who are struck down in the Great Massacre. The Incas are given pronounced "native" accents and the whole approach to them is more Lion King than Peter Brook. The lack of true astonishment, scenically and musically, is, well, pretty surprising.

The two principals are spot on. The irony of the piece is that the conqueror, Alun Armstrong's earthy, cynical, fame-hungry Pizarro becomes spiritually captivated by the conquered - Paterson Joseph's beautiful, wittily arrogant Atahuallpa. The actors make the growing bond between the men moving and believable and there's a desolate sense of loss and bitter betrayal when the Sun God does not rise from the dead. If the play has a message, it seems to be E M Forster's Only Connect and there are shades not only of his work but of, say, The King and I. The production gathers power towards the close, but before that, this Royal Hunt too often loses the scent.