By Jim Hiley
| David Burke and Clive Russell duel it out while Rickman watches from the top of the stairs (detail, right). |
oward Davies has set his Troilus and Cressida (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford)
in one room. And for a play which meanders back and forth between the armies
at the siege of Troy, that's quite an original approach.
Davies's chosen location is the ball of a mansion; or
perhaps some gentlemen's club, where everything except the grand, busy staircase
looks in urgent need of repair. This does not just represent battle-scarred
Troy but serves, curiously, as a meeting ground for the Greeks as well.
Meeting is the operative word. Both sides are commanded by crusty windbags,
who glare across tables in baleful, sedentary conference. Their tunics suggest
the Crimean War, and ingenious props strengthen the transposition.
Romantic piano music clangs on and off during the action,
and Clive Merrison's cream-outfitted, frothy Pandarus accompanies the closing
mayhem at a battered upright. But apart from the occasional entrance of
a gasping casualty, little disturbs the atmosphere of Chekhov-among-the-military
until well into the third hour.
This helps the elaborate gentility exchanged between
off-duty enemies. More, it emphasises the weary ritual into which the siege
has descended and the distracted, overgrown schoolboys so many of the characters
are, or have become. The duel between Hector and Ajax, for example, is accompanied
by the roars of a fifth-form grudge fight.
Surrounded by such heartiness and self-importance, Thersites'
taste for senselessness makes particular sense, and Alun Armstrong leaps
on a rich comic opportunity. With grizzly, bespectacled demeanour, he rasps
out his drolleries, overturning furniture and smashing glass as he peremptorily
sweeps the stage.
But the smartest casting of the evening
has Alan Rickman as Achilles, a warrior-cum-aesthete in decline.
Few other actors could have lurched so smoothly between the character's
indolence, heroics and treachery, not to mention his confusing brand of
sexuality. 'Is this Achilles?' wonders poor old Hector (David Burke).
Juliet Stevenson provides a powerful grown-up Cressida,
modern and only very slightly coy. Among many telling moments, her best
come with the return to the Greeks. Here she shows Cressida fighting back
coolly and cannily after the imposed attentions or the men. Anton Lesser's
Troilus is agitated rather than infatuated, though, and simply never a match
for her. Elsewhere, there are a few too many club bores around.
Bly keeping things intimate, Howard Davies throws greater
weight on to the love affair. The trouble is that he has ditched poetry
along with scale. His production is seldom less than imposing, but lacks
fire.
At least he has had a concept and stuck to it, even if
it sometimes collides with the text. And it's an all too rare pleasure to
encounter an entire cast who have clearly worked out why they are saying
what, throughout.
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