Peter Viney's Blog

Troilus & Cressida
by William Shakespeare

Directed by Gregory Doran
Design by Niki Turner
Music score by Evelyn Glennie

Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
Friday 26th October 2018, 19.30

CAST:
Nicole Agada (Paris’ servant)
Adjoa Andoh (Ulysses)
Andy Apollo (Achilles)
Charlotte Arrowsmith (Cassandra)
Daisy Badger (Helen)
Desmond Barrit (Pandarus)
Suzanne Bertish (Agamemnon)
Daniel Burke(Diomed)
James Cooney (Patroclus)
Oliver Ford Davies (Nestor)
Gavin Fowler (Troilus)
Helen Grady (Calchas)
Amanda Harris (Aeneas)
Daniel Hawksford (Hector)
Amber James (Cressida)
Andrew Langtree (Menelaus)
Geoffrey Lumb(Paris)
Esther McAuley (Hecuba)
Theo Ogundipe (Ajax)
Leigh Quinn (Alexandra)
Sheila Reid (Thersites)
Mikhail Sen(Helenus)
Ewart James Walters (King Priam)
Gabby Wong (Andromache/Antenor).

MUSIC

Percussion  Evelyn Glennie

Gavin Fowler as Troilus, Amber James as Cressida

OMG, the RSC who I thought sensible are following The Globe in gender equal casting. So Agamemnon, the male military hero and leader, is played by a woman. OMG? Sorry, WTF? We had already decided not to renew our Globe membership after a truly dire Globe year under Michelle Terry. But surely not the RSC too! They’ve had a very good year in 2018. Do not enter the Globe’s gender-blind dark side!

Troilus & Cressida was one of the two Shakespeare plays I had not seen live on stage. So I thought. I have described before seeing Coriolanus on a Cornish clifftop in strong wind at the Minack Theatre in the 1960s. I found the ticket the other day. It was in fact Troilus & Cressida. Ah, well, the difference between Roman and Greek armour is esoteric, and I expect Roman is easier to hire.

It’s a play that depends on at least a basic knowledge of the Trojan Wars and the participants, which would be a given for the Elizabethan audience. The programme notes that it was John Barton’s favourite Shakespeare play. John Barton directed it at the RSC three times, and gave Greg Doran his notes on the play. Some are reproduced in the programme. We saw John Barton’s Tantalus (ten x one hour plays) at Milton Keynes, and that was the ultimate on the Trojan War theme for me as well as one of my greatest theatrical experiences. Only three or four stages in the UK were well enough equipped and large enough to put it on. At one point characters emerged up through a pool of water, and there were massive flames at other points.

Chaucer did Troilus & Cressida as a romance. There were theatre versions pre-Shakespeare too. According to Anthony Burgess it was a flop in its day (though I don’t know how we know that) and it has been accused more than once as too much talk, too little action. That’s right. Then you get a great deal of fight action right at the end.

I bought the DK “Shakespeare Book” for the grandkids reference, but kept it for myself. It’s so useful on unfamiliar plays. The play was originally listed as a “comedy” and it deconstructs the hero myths by showing them as fallible people. Menelaus is a cuckold and laughing stock, Achilles is reluctant to fight and a coward in killing the unarmed Hector with his Myrmidons – he doesn’t even do it himself, Ajax is plain thick, Paris is vain, Ulysses is a twister but we knew that anyway, Nestor is an addled geriatric. Maybe Shakespeare had enough Trojan Wars shoved on him at school. The player king’s speech in Hamlet lampoons the genre – Anthony Burgess is surely alone in thinking it a recycled outtake from this play.

Helen in descending ball. Menelaus bottom right looking up

They say that the whole set has been designed with percussion in mind, (really?)and Evelyn Glennie’s percussion score is central to the concept, again according to the programme, which cites oil drums, boxes and panels placed on stage for percussion. I expected whole cast participation having read that, but there wasn’t any at all. The on stage stuff only seemed to be used after the lights went up, before we filed out and very good it was.  Again, I had expected an actual percussion score, but it was just short bursts. Nowhere near as impressive as reviews suggested.

Amber James as Cressida

The costumes have been described as Mad Max. That is, steampunk.  The Greek tents are rusty ship containers, actually a good substitute for beach accommodation  in a kind of era non-specific dystopia with swords, Greek robes, and tunics,  plastic armor, metal shields, several motorbikes, a bike driven array of horns and a pistol, which Ulysses uses to murder Patrocolus. It sounds weird, but it worked very well as interesting and colorful costume, and always looked ‘designed’ rather than ‘dressing up box.’

Adjoah Andoh as Ulysses with Suzanne Bertish as Agamemnon

The 50/50 gender split doesn’t come across as daft as it does at The Globe. Partly the outrageous costumes and wigs are ambivalent, partly Ulysses and Agamemnon are both especially strong performers, though Adjoa Andoh while powerful, is as stylised as an 18th or 19th century actor manager with hissing, shouting and air sawing. I thought the gender switch gave an extr over the top edge to the switched roles. You don’t notice it too much, except for a lone female soldier with sword and tiny shield at the end who really does look and sound daft. I might have avoided giving Aeneas a skirt, albeit an Ancient Greek skirt.  Fortunately, The Director cast the main fighting roles as males, and Ajax, Achilles and Hector all look the part – big, tough guys. Enormous tough guy, in the case of Ajax who looks tremendous with his bare chest and beard. I loved a touch when Ulysses had to restrain Ajax by touching his chest and immediately wiped the supposed sweat off her hand on her trousers. Daniel Hawksford impressed me as Hector, managing to look equally hard and tough as did Ajax towering over him.

Daniel Hawksford as Hector

Cassandra is a deaf actor, which given the role is fine, though in 2018 it is becoming a PC given addition. It was disastrous with As You Like It at The Globe, because the role involved dialogue. Here it adds a dimension to her pained prophecy which they fail to act upon.

Ajax played by Theo Ogundipe

I admit I found the Greek / Trojan bit confusing, but so must they have found it confusing at the time as they were so often related. So Hector is entertained royally at the Greek camp, as is Troilus, as they are cousins with Ajax. It was the same ‘keep it in the family’ with warring 16th century monarchs when the play was written, and it was the same with World War One where King George V, the Kaiser and the Czar were first cousins. It is part of the futility of the whole Trojan War, well, according to Homer. We are seven years in, three to go. King Priam and his sons debate what to do with Helen. Is it worth all the trouble to keep her? Then Troilus loses Cressida in a kind of hostage swap – her mother (in this) is on the Greek side. Her Greek guardian is Diomedes, who she then gets off with to Troilus’ chagrin.

I was glad to lose the confusion, and focus on Troilus (Gavin Fowler), Cressida (Amber James) and her uncle, Pandarus   (Oliver Ford Davies). They rightly steal the show, though looking back at descriptions of the play in the past, they have been almost a sub plot. Not here, because all three are so good and work so well together. They also all get touches of humour throughout.

My companion disliked it. I liked the acting mostly, costumes and set, and it was the play itself that I have my doubts about. I don’t know it well enough to judge, but I have read Homer,  and listened to different audio books on the Iliad because my oldest son was very interested in it in his teens. So I wasn’t at a loss on the base characters, but I still lost the plot at times.

in the brief summary review in Saturday’s Telegraph, Domenic Cavendish says:

It’s slim pickings emotionally with Gavin Fowler and Lily James’ doomed lovers sidelined. Hacking the running time would help.

It would. It runs a full three hours, plus the interval. It feels long, not helped by the long series of very well choreographed and executed fights at the end, though I would keep them. I would leave the lovers and Pandarus intact too, as the three best performances, along with the marvellous Ajax.

Theristes (Shelia reid)

The paring knife needs to fall on the Greek camp’s sections, especially on Theristes (a scruffy camp follower)’s wordy and unfunny interventions with Achilles and Patroclus. As Achilles is so tall, and Sheila Reid so tiny, they look hilarious together, but she is burdened with those tedious Shakespeare clown speeches, which make little sense and haven’t been funny since a few weeks after Shakespeare wrote them. If they ever were. I like Sheila Reid, but I can’t think any comic actor could make them work.

It is an old rule, but when a long production is firing on all cylinders, it never feels long.

***

NT LIVE BROADCAST:

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

five star
Louis Train, Broadway World *****

four star
Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, ****

This production boasts a 50:50 gender-balanced cast, an RSC first, but I mean it only as a compliment when I say that this is perhaps the least interesting thing about it.

Catherine Vonledebur, What’s On Stage ****

three star
Michael Billington, The Guardian ***

There is still a central paradox about this production. Everything about Niki Turner’s design, with its vast container trucks, and warriors swathed in futuristic goggles and jangling ironmongery, implies that we are in some chaotic, postapocalyptic world. Shakespeare’s play is clearly about the disintegration of moral certainties and established values but it also takes place against a Homeric background. Debunking mythic heroes loses much of its pungency if you are already on the road to dystopia.

Dominic Cavendish,The Telegraph, ***

To lay siege to this epic, patience-testing portrait of those two sides, who have reached stalemate after seven years of sparring over the abducted Helen, director Gregory Doran has marshalled a mighty company of 24. For the first time, it’s a 50/50 gender-split (the play contains only four female characters), though the immediate effect is to diminish the necessary surfeit of testosterone.

Jane Edwardes Sunday Times ***

The dystopian vision renders the presence of women more feasible and has the added advantage of making the colour blind casting quite unremarkable.

Rosemary Waugh, The Stage ***

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

GREGORY DORAN
Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 RSC
Henry V – Alex Hassell, RSC, 2015
Julius Caesar – RSC 2012
Richard II – RSC 2013, David Tennant as Richard II
The Witch of Edmonton by Rowley, Dekker & Ford, RSC
Death of A Salesman, by Arthur Miller, RSC 2015
King Lear  – RSC 2016
The Tempest, RSC 2016
Measure For Measure, RSC 2019

GAVIN FOWLER
Salome, RSC 2017
The Winter’s Tale, RSC, 2013 (Florizel)
The Taming of The Shrew, RSC, 2012 (Lucentio)
The Syndicate, by Eduardo de Fillippo, Bath 2011

AMBER JAMES
Dido, Queen of Carthage, RSC 2017 (Anna)
Antony & Cleopatra, RSC 2017 (Charmiane)
Titus Andronicus, RSC 2017 (goth, midwife)
Two Gentlemen of Verona, Globe tour, 2016

THEO OGUNDIPE
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Old Vic 2017
King Lear  – RSC 2016
Hamlet, RSC 2016
Julius Caesar, RSC 2012

OLIVER FORD DAVIES
Richard II, RSC, 2013
Henry V, RSC 2015
The Chalk Garden, Chichester 2018

DAISY BADGER
Miss Littlewood, RSC 2018
The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich, RSC 2018

ANDY APOLLO
Volpone, RSC 2015
Love’s Sacrifice, RSC 2015
The Jew of Malta, RSC 2015

JAMES COONEY
King Lear  – RSC 2016
Cymbeline, RSC 2016
Hamlet, RSC 2016
Flare Path, Rattigan, Salisbury 2015
Measure For Measure, RSC 2019

EWART JAMES WALTERS
Sweet Bird of Youth, Chichester 2017
King Lear  – RSC 2016
Hamlet, RSC 2016
Julius Caesar, RSC 2012

GEOFFREY LUMB
Coriolanus, RSC 2017
Vice Versa, RSC 2017

SHEILA REID
Pericles, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2015

GABBY WONG
Volpone, RSC 2015
Love’s Sacrifice, RSC 2015
The Jew of Malta, RSC 2015

ADJOA ANDOH
Julius Caesar, RSC 2012