Troilus and Cressida (review)

It is one of the hard lessons of this play that the less you expect—of life, of love, and of performance in general—the less likely you are to have your heart broken. Expectation tickles skittish spirits and it is also the fuel of the theatregoer; the monstrosity of performance is that spectatorial desire is boundless but the acting generally a slave to limit. Each time I revisited this production, I expected a little less and each time I came away fractionally more satisfied. It was not that the production “improved” (we should be wary of the Whig theory of the theatrical run); nor was this the theatrical equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome in which the multiple re-viewer learns first to admire and then to love his captors. Rather, this gradual accommodation to Matthew Dunster’s uneven production was probably a function of proxemics: I first saw the production from the centre of the lower gallery, next from the middle of the yard, and finally from the lip of the downstage left. Getting closer to this production enabled you to see some of its texture and to appreciate the many intelligent and subtle choices being made by individual actors (with some exceptions: Paul Stocker’s Troilus was stubbornly wooden close-up too.) Jamie Ballard’s excellent, unusually young and tenor-voiced Ulysses, for example, was a performance rich in detail: as he surveyed the warriors from above, he told Agamemnon of how Troilus, “in the heat of action / Is more vindictive than jealous love”; on “jealous love,” Ballard’s eye alighted on Diomedes and briefly—if you were close enough—you saw the pleasure of a new scheme flicker across his features. Viewed from the circumference of the Globe, then, this production was weak in scenes of intimacy and argumentation, stronger and more comfortable with spectacle and situation comedy. Getting closer flattened out this unevenness.

Anna Fleischle’s set continued the trend of recent Globe seasons in fundamentally altering the dimensions of the playing space. An extended apron curved out from downstage left; into this was cut a ramp allowing for entrances from the yard. Round stone benches were installed at the foot of the two columns. Most strikingly, a large wooden structure dominated the upstage centre; at floor-level, this provided a canopied, tent-like thrust discovery space—whilst, above, it served to extend the balcony almost as far downstage as the columns. (These extensions seemed almost designed for the action of 1.2, in which the warriors wearily returned up the ramp to be observed by Pandarus and Cressida from the extended balcony.) The floor-cloth and columns were a stained off-white against which the costumes—purple Trojans, sky blue Greeks—stood out in bold relief. Accents were also coded: most of the Trojans attempted the flat vowels found on either side of the Pennines; the Greek tongue was more eclectic (including Scots, Welsh and RP), presumably to indicate the greater landmass and strength of the invaders, although I’m loathe to attach too much interpretive weight to an idea that was so erratically executed.

The first half of the production rolled along, a symptom of its priorities being the contrast between the stunted, static council scenes and two elaborate innovations.

The Greek council scene (1.3) was heavily cut but nevertheless dragged. Anyone unfamiliar with the play would not have known who these people were, the relative status amongst them, nor why they were arranged in an archipelago of inaction. The Trojan council scene (2.2) was hardly more dynamic: the pacifists stage-right, the belligerents stage-left; Hector’s volte-face...