30 June 1985
he Royal Shakespeare Company continues to get
away with murderous mayhem.
The victim, alas, is Shakespeare. And the place, sacrilege compounding the
offence, is Stratford-upon-Avon.
Their latest travesty is of Troilus and Cressida
hitherto supposed to be about the Trojan war.
Director Howard Davies has no patience with
that notion nor with the idea that a timeless comment is best made in the
universal context of mythology. He moves the scene to the Crimea in the
1850s.
To get the players in the right mood, his rehearsals
were evidently augmented by discussions of war profiteering, prostitution
and 19th-century morality. No wonder the poor mummers, in performance, make
little sense of the play.
Virtually the only character whom Shakespeare
might recognise is young Troilus, played by Anton Lesser with romantic anguish.
His love, Cressida
(Juliet Stevenson), in the interests of latter-day feminism, is no faithless
wanton but the helpless toy of lascivious men.
Her uncle Pandarus (Clive Merrison, cynically
disenchanted) is the straw-hatted central figure, and Thersites (Alun Armstrong)
is played as a Geordie comedian.
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