OWARD DAVIES'S new production
of Troilus and Cressida at Stratford
on Avon has a distinctly Germanic feel to it. It is not merely the Wagnerian
length (close on four hours). It has to do with Ralph Koltai's magnificent
setting of baroque dilapidation, with the focus on a mood of exhausted decadence
and with the translation of Greeks and Trojans into Bismarckian pragmatists
and bibulous junkers. The production is not perfect but it is much the best
of the Stratford season so far: intellectually challenging and theatrically
exciting.
Davies is not the first to update the play (Guthrie 30
years ago set it around the turn of the century) and transposition does
not solve all the problems. Shakes. peare's play is partly a reduction of
Homeric legend and an attack on the idealisation of war and sex.
If the characters look like bronze supermen, the contrast
between appearance and reality is all the more ironic: if, as here, they
might be Prussian warriors or fatigued combatants in the Crimea the de-glamorisation
means less. War, in the age of dynamite and the Gatling gun, had long ceased
to be heroic.
The application of a modern intelligence to the play
also provokes many questions, and nowhere more so than in Juliet Stevenson's
revolutionary interpretation of Cressida. Gone is the usual wanton flirt.
Her love for Troilus is real and urgent, their enforced separation leads
to hysterical breakdown and the famous scene where she is kissed by the
Greek general is tantamount to rape.
In the short term this pays rich dividends: Ulysses's
description of her 'as a "daughter of the game" becomes the violent
reaction of a man humiliated by being expected to beg a kiss. But in the
long term it raises problems: the scene with Diomedes becomes hard to play
(he may be her protector but why does she have to give him Troilus's favour
?). Even more crucially it undercuts the point that to the Elizabethans.
Cressida was the archetype of the false lover.
But I would much rather have a radical production that
raised questions than a conservative one that ignored them, and where this
version scores superbly is in its evor. ation of a depleted, battered world
in which war and love have turned to dust.
Koltai's permanent set is a looted mansion in which the
ballastrades are rickety [sic] and the ceiling crumbling. Ilona Sekacz's
thunderous piano chords are like distorted Chopin pin preludes. And the
Greeks, with their phonographs and ticker tapes, are wittily distinguished.
from the Trojans, who inhabit a vanished chivalric world of candelabra.
brandy and dressing for dinner.
Updating also throws individual characters into sharp
relief. For once Thersites (well played by Alun Armstrong as an insolent
messhand who uses his tongue as a defence against punishment) does not become
the spokesman.
If any one character sums up the mood of this production
it is the Pandarus of Clive Merrison (still wearing his white suit from
The Possessed): a seedy camp-follower who lives vicariously off war
and copulation but who finally sits picking out a wistful tune on the piano
as the lights of battle blaze and as structured society disintegrates. I
found this a chilling moment: an unforgettable image of a collapsing civilisation.
Alan Rickman's Achilles stubbly and neurotic,
equally offers a picture of individual decadence, and the moment when his
rifle-toting Myrmidons. dons gun down David Burke's brass-voiced Hector
underline Davies's success in finding modern equivalents for mythic treachery.
Ms Stevenson's feminist Cressida and Anton Lesser's rashly romantic Troilus
also stand out In a good company in which Lindsay Duncan's Helen, a tired
society tart, and Peter Jeffrey's Ulysses, who looks as if he has been reading
Clausewitz on the collapse of nation states, make their mark.
Judging by the rattle of costume jewellery round me,
not all the tourists were transfixed. But this, production, though long,
rubs m the modernity of this masterpiece and (in its Germanic way) reminds
one of the truth of Heine's dictum: where the Greek poets glorify reality,
he wrote, "the keen-witted shovel of Shakespeare's intelligence digs
into the quiet- earth of appearances, disclosing sing to our eyes their
hidden roots."
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