- Troilus and Cressida
2012 was the season for Troilus and Cressidain the United States. Companies in Boston (Actors’ Shakespeare Project, directed by Tina Packer), Spring Green, Wisconsin (American Players Theatre), and Ashland (Oregon Shakespeare Festival) produced this relatively unpopular [End Page 529]play. Plenty has been said, by critics and directors alike, about the relevance of Troilusto our contemporary age. Its bitter look at love and war resonates with us, and is likely to continue doing so. I saw the productions in Ashland and Spring Green within a week of one another, which gave me the opportunity to consider what directors and actors were doing with this troublesome drama in the same season. The clear point of divergence was that in Ashland Rob Melrose chose to set the play during the recent Iraq conflict, while at APT William Brown used classical costumes that harkened back to Homer. Such fundamental choices about staging did indeed impact the play, but I was struck by the ways in which these productions, despite their obvious discrepancies, staged similar interpretations of Troilus.
As is often the case with modern-setting approaches, Melrose’s production made provocative use of the parallels between Shakespeare’s world and our own. Troilus’sgrim look at war found an appropriate expression through the embittered soldiers of the Greek side who seemed to have little idea of why they were in Troy, while their commanding officer, Agamemnon, tried in vain to keep his troupes rallied behind a common cause. These bored but jumpy soldiers passed the time by driving golf balls and shooting at the empty air. In this setting, Patroclus became a much-maligned gay soldier from the US military, Thersites became a dealer in drugs and other black-market items and, perhaps most interestingly, Elijah Alexander’s Ajax became an American Muslim who wore a Palestinian scarf and knelt on a prayer mat. This was an insightful way of translating the play’s depiction of Ajax as half Trojan and half Greek; here, his “mixed blood” was the sympathy he felt for his opponents who shared his religion. At the same time, the script’s insistence on Ajax’s limited mental capacities was played for its full measure of laughs, which caused this potentially intriguing depiction of Ajax to border on a (presumably unintentional) religious slur.
The Trojans in this production were portrayed as a Middle Eastern royal family, entrenched in hierarchy, a long tradition of armed conflicts, and a deeply religious history embodied by Cassandra, who wore a full-length burqa (poignantly, Tala Ashe played both Cassandra and Cressida, as if to reflect upon two models of Middle Eastern women). Family dynamics created a moving portrait of the Trojans, especially as these relationships disintegrated by the end of the play. An outraged Troilus shunned his brother Paris after being forced to give up Cressida, and Hector slapped Troilus for his outspoken views in act five, scene three; the long-standing royal family was catapulting toward its nadir. On the [End Page 530]other hand, the contemporary setting had no way to explicate the play’s emphasis upon honor. The...