Full attention on the lovers allows a brief glimpse of hope
rom the time of Guthrie's Ruritanian version in the early
Fifties, it has been an ingrained assumption that Troilus and Cressida foreshadows
Arms and the Man as a contest - with a foregone conclusion - between gallantry
and realpolitik. Every production I can remember has presented two contrasted
military worlds.
Apart from the matter of distinguishing uniforms, no
such contrast appears in Howard Davies's treatment of the play. The only
division is between combatants and civilians; and, even then, the war has
had the effect of grinding them all down to the same level.
They share the same setting (by Ralph Koltai): a gutted
palace hall with shattered windows, crazed doorways and smoke-blackened
paintings, retaining just enough grandeur to indicate what has then lost.
Here the Greeks and Trojans hold the their crafty, acrimonious confrences
and finally cut each other to shreds amid the din of the battlefield. As
for gallantry, there is little to pick between Achilles's myrmidons and
the heavies who attend on Sean Baker 's belatedly satiated Paris. The only
relief comes in the wonderful scene, out of time. when war is briefly suspended
and the two sides stand gazing at the towers of Troy from the vantage-point
of history.
The period appears to be Crimean, though samovars and
Russian newspapers sometimes raise the spectre of the Winter Palace. Mr
Davies has great fun with anachronisms: immortalizing the Achilles-Hector
handclasp with a flash photograph, and allowing Agamemnon to report Patroclus's
death over a field telephone. In the midst of the rubble stands an upright
piano, to which Pandarus and others frequently repair to plonk out llona
Sekacz's twisted echoes of the waltzes and polonaises of the time.
The prevailing tone is comic, going much beyond the bitterly
sardonic into the region of gags and belly laughs The key performance here
is Alun Armstrong's Thersites, who abdicates his role as Shakespeare's spokesman
on "wars and lechery" and reverts from venomous denunciation to
playing a Geordie clown in thick pebble-glasses, characteristically seen
parading up and down as Agamemnon wearing a saucepan helmet which he then
cannot get off.
Mr Armstrong is a treat. But who has taken his place
at the play's s moral centre? Evidently Clive Morrison's [sic] Pandarus--a
white-suited ventier in a Panama hat busily greasing the wheels to bring
the lovers together and finally hammering out an elegiac waltz amidst the
smoke and gun fire.
It is an electrifying performance, part Mr Norris: part
Dr Miracle but it, does not supply a focal point between the desolating
image of the war and the broad comic detail of the production. What it does
achieve, for once, is to concentrate full attention on the lovers, who are
apt to get swamped by surrounding events. This time the statement gets squarely
made that Troilus and Cressida contribute the only new and briefly hopeful
element to the story before that too is obliterated by the war.
They are superbly played by Anton Lesser, feverishly
obsessive, his tongue racing to keep up with his flow of thought, and Juliet
Stevenson. whose love, once declared, bursts out in the unfakable form of
volcanic anger, and who relapses, tragically. with the Greeks after a scene
verging on gang rape. Like her Isabella, this performance reclaims a part
for which some actresses apologize and anchors it in the facts of human
behaviour. Among the Greeks an unshaven Alan Rickman overplays the
hysterical tantrums even for Achilles; there is a magnificently stately
Ulysses from Peter Jeffrey and a fine, doomed Patroclus by Hilton McCrae.
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