Shakespeare
Troilus and Cressida
Royal Shakespeare Theare, Stratford-upon-Avon
he Prologue's admission that Troilus and
Cressida contains only "what may be digested in a play" seems
to concede that that there is something fundamentally intractable about
its donnée. Although it is not the rarity in performance it once
was, modern productions hve not found it easy to make either its material
or its manner accessible to audiences for whom the Trojan war might just
as well not have taken place. The inescapable power and presence of the
Homeric protagonists for Shakespeare's public are indicated in his text
by the remarkable self-consciousness that many of them show about their
status--most notably perhaps in the scene where Troilus, Cressida and Pandarus
type-cast themselves "to the world's end." Part of the play's
curious and individual tone cmes from the calculated and exploited discrepancy
between the immense heroic prestige of the dramits personae and the way
their received reputation is overtly or obliquely impugned. Now, however,
it has become so difficult to take epic seriously that the sting of mock-epic
is no longer felt, and the precarious and fascinating balance in Troilus
and Cressida between homage and disrespect, between heroic and anti-heroic,
has become extremely difficult to re-create theatrically.
In practice, the usual way of bridging
the Homeric gap has been to make the war itself seem real by connecting
it with some more recent conflict which has a meaningful iconography for
us, even though that probably means sacrificing the ideal and universal
character which its heroism had in Shakespeare's day. Howard Davies's new
production at Stratford has settled for a policy of late nineteenth-century
Balkanization. We seem to be somewhere between Millais's picture "The
Black Brunswicker" and Jean Renoir's film La Grande Illusion. The stage
is dominated by Ralph Koltai's set, which suggests some manor or chateau
not far from the front line which has been commandeered to serve as GHQ.
Despite signs of the new military technology--primitive telephone, telegraph,
typewriter--the place is in a tatty condition, and not surprisingly so with
batmen like Thersites to tidy it up. The same interior is made to serve
both Greek and Trojan camps, so those who don't know the play may be confused
at times, as well as puzzled by the characters' ability to sight Greek tents
and Trojan walls at the back of the stalls. Nevertheless the strategy does
at least underline the point that both aprties are locked into the same
situation. "War and lechery" are relentless levellers.
The war side of the play ends in a strongly
orchestrated "show" (in First World War terms), with much off-stage
shell and machine-gun fire and an impressive display of the resources of
Stratford's lighting grid. Achilles has Hector shot--not cut--down by the
Mymidons, but hand-to-hand conflicts involve the usual sword-play. This
mix is better managed than in the current National Theatre Coriolanus,
but it still seems uneasy. The lechery is more successful. It is particularly
associated with a battered upright used for entertainment during those periods
of suspended action of which this play is so intriguingly full, and most
tellingly in the scene between Paris and Helen which approaches a Brecht/Weill
kind of decadence; their humiliation of Pandarus is strikingly brutal. Pandarus
himself (dressed in light Beerbohmish suiting) remains at the piano throughout
the alarms and excursions of Act Five.
Such determined counterpoint is typical of
the production's tendency to rely on stage effect rather than grapple with
the admittedly considerable problems presented by its idiosyncratic diction.
In such an environment, the prose is likely to come off best, and some of
the off-duty moments feel modern and fresh. Juliet Stevenson's Cressida
has a powerful contemporary style--too much so really for Anton Lesser's
ipetuous and often flimsy Troilus--and she makes the character's underlying
motivation entirely credible. She is helped in this by the ugly suggestiveness
of the scene in which she is gang-kissed by the Greek commanders; such a
girl at such a time and place needs a Diomede to protect her from worse
things. Both lovers, however, rush the language so much that the text becomes
expendable in the search for the subtext. Elsewhere--and despite the welcome
presence of such veterans as Joseph O'Conor (Agamemnon) and Mark Dignam
(Nestor)--the verse is not spoke with much feelng for its particular style.
Although David Burke's Hector is strongly spoken, the debates between the
Trojans are not much more convincing than those among the Greeks. It is
hard for those Homeric figures to achieve their intended stature if their
langage is not given its due. Something of what is neglected can be glimpsed
in Alan Rickman's insolent Achilles, which has an arresting intensity.
If the heroes of the Trojan war do not at least
go through the motions of living up to their historic names, there seems
little shock-value in rubbishing them. One of the odd effects of this production
is that Thersites, the normally rebarbative railer at the great, becomes
almost lovable. Alun Armstrong play shim as an insubordinate, but not uncongenial
Tynesider rather than as the scrofulous heap sometimes seen, and he is much
more like other Shakespearean fools than usual. His denigration is no moe
than barrack-room bickering; the fact that nothing else holds fashion apart
from wars and lechery leaves him almost upset. As a result, he perversely
attains some of that dignity which his superiors have failed to assume,
and thus underlines the absence of that heroic scale which this interesting
but reductive production has not attempted to supply.
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