27 June 1985
WO DIRECTORIAL changes imposed upon Troilus and Cressida
weaken the Royal Shakespeare Company's s new production at Stratford.
Thanks to some dynamic performances, the play survives the first fairly
well--a typically gimmicky RSC dislocation of scene. The second constitutes
a misinterpretation of Shakespeare's purpose.
First, the action is transferred from the plains of Hellenic
Troy to (approximately) Sevastopol in the Crimean War. Everything takes
place in a dilapidated mansion occupied alternately by Greeks in field grey
and Trojans in Ruritanian maroon. Beneath its shattered ceiling pictures
hang awry and a door is off its hinges. Tickertape, field telephones, and
a tinny much-heard piano only add to the dreariness of the scene.
Uprooting the play from its classical setting imparts
a grim vigour and may help those illiterates to whom Troy is a fairy tale.
Howard Davies directs to give a modern and near-Marxist slant to the poet's
examination of strife, lechery, crime, rage and lust, which here are his
whole concern.
But, in attributing these vices to the Victorians, he
destroys that universality which belongs to a great myth and makes it hurt
us where we live. Thus women in the play become blowsy and bedraggled camp
followers and the quarrelling generals recall Dickensian Bumbles and Gradgrinds.
So the production seems to blame the decadence on 19th century social conditions--and
indeed Peter Jeffrey's Ulysses looks like Mr. Gladstone.
The more serious distortion is a question of tone. 'There
is nothing wrong with Anton Lesser's hysterical little Troilus, lunatically
obsessed with Juliet Stevenson's slack-limbed and morbidly convincing Cressida
who want only betrays him an hour after she has pledged herself his forever.
Other compelling portraits are also on view--Alan
Rickman's sulky, conceited and world-weary Achilles (although he never
suggests a great warrior), David Burke's vain and self-indulgent Hector
and Clive Merrison's Pandarus, a dissipated schoolmaster up to mischief.
But in writing of these savage and mercilessly studied
events, Shakespeare's attitude was surely that of his scurrilous Greek observer,
Thersites, to whom the cynical behaviour of both warriors and their doxies
was terrifyingly funny. It is his laughter which makes this ironic satire
so formidable. In the part, Alun Armstrong only gags with spilled beer cans,
or sticks a saucepan on his head.
Unlike his author. Mr Davies has not detached himself
from the horrors, so there is no aloof death's head grin. As Helen, Lindsay
Duncan gets no chance to be comical as well as contemptible. Throughout,
the mood is narrow-minded political anger. What was needed was mockery and
a cosmic disgust with mankind.
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