Troilus and Cressida (review)

Like or find fault; do as you pleasures are; Now, good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war.

These are the final lines of the play’s avant-garde prologue, which was absent from this production. By 1601, Shakespeare had written popular tragedies, festive comedies, and Hamlet—which was advertised on the first quarto as having been performed in London and “also in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and elsewhere.” With a string of successful plays under his belt, Shakespeare perhaps felt that he was now in a position to really test his audience with an experimental “war.” Writing a play on a Trojan theme that could cause expectation to “tickle skittish spirits,” Shakespeare produced characters troubled with what would be expected of them, and an eponymous male lover who would declare “expectation whirls me round” before being thoroughly disappointed. It is sometimes argued that Shakespeare’s play is unexpected in that it deconstructs the epic language of Homer’s Iliad and the chivalric discourse of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. But this in itself can hardly have been surprising to Shakespeare’s early-modern audience: his plays are riddled with jokes ridiculing Troilus and Cressida, and their pander (think of Petruchio’s fawning spaniel named Troilus in The Taming of the Shrew). What seems to be most groundbreaking is the play’s relationship with its audience. It is a play that ends with Pandarus promising to bequeath his diseases to the spectators: this tone is in stark contrast to Feste’s promise in Twelfth Night that the company would “strive to please you every day.” In Shakespeare’s Trojan play, the joke seems to be at our expense. “And when you gaze for long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you”—Nietzsche’s disconcerting aphorism fits Shakespeare’s ironic theatrical response here to those who claimed that theatre was false, diseasing, and immoral. By staging the troubles of the Trojan War as a profoundly Elizabethan problem, Troilus and Cressida turns the audience’s gaze back onto itself. No doubt, the playwright’s retelling of this epic story was also a shot at those who shared Ben Jonson’s fondness for all things classical, and so the play can be seen metatheatrically as being about staging the story.

If Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida challenged its audience, so too did the Wooster/RSC’s cross-Atlantic production, with walkouts (including those by eminent Stratford academics) being quickly reported in the media and on social networking sites. With the New York theatre company playing the Trojans and the traditionally conservative RSC playing the Greeks, the production promised to be something of a Shakespearean dance-off. The Trojans were staged as pseudo Native Americans: complete with a homemade teepee situated upstage, the pale-faced actors were clothed in DayGlo-painted tribal costumes that were meant to look as if they were costumes, perhaps from Toy Story. In keeping with the homo ludens theme of the play, several of the Trojans sported lacrosse paraphernalia or other game equipment (Aeneas held a basketball). None of the Trojans used “real” weapons. The only concession to the classical ancestry of the story seemed to be the Styrofoam statuary tied to the backs of...