26 June 1985
or nations to go to war over something so trivial as
the love of one woman is, no doubt as lunatic as for a civilisation to tear
itself apart over the death of a single Archduke.
So Howard Davies has the irony of history on his side
in updating Shakespeare's sneering account of the fall of Troy and comparing
it to the follies of the First World War.
It must be admitted that it makes the evening the long
four-hour evening rich in atmosphere but poor in characterisation.
The setting is a gutted mansion in which a once grand
staircase is adorned only by peeling Old Masters, a dead chandelier and
swathes of dust sheets.
The symbolism is obvious. A monument to the ravages of
war on ordered life. Would that everything else were so clear. For having
said that war is a trivial pursuit even for its heroes, where else can the
play go?
By reducing the legendary giants of Greek history immediately
to supporting players in a conflict so close to our own times is to blunt
the savagery of Shakespeare satire before the first thrust.
The effect is as deadening as dragging the Queen Mary
through a sea of Mars bars. What mileage is there in discrediting an era
we already look on with pity and contempt? Where is the surprise in revealing
Hector, Achilles, Ajax, Agamemnon, Priam, Paris and the legendary Helen
of Troy as a bunch of Hooray Henries and their whores if the joke is signalled
before the first line?
Yet Anton Lesser, despite looking curiously like Kenny
Everett, manages to infuse Troilus with a true passion amid all the stagey
heroics.
Indeed the production is full of Interesting individual
performances.
But the market in character assassination is undoubtedly
cornered by Alun Armstrong as a garrulously anarchic Geordie mess hand.
To hear Mr Armstrong contemptuously dismiss the Trojan tragedy as a quarrel
between a whore and a cuckold is to know the roots of disillusion in the
common man for the vain-glorious principles of their betters down the ages.
Back to:
Troilus and Cressida Page