|
The first main stage revival at Stratford-upon-Avon of Troilus and Cressida in 10 years takes time to exert a strong grip, but proves a worthy successor to famous RSC productions by Peter Hall and John Barton, Howard Davies and, most recently, Sam Mendes. Only Measure for Measure of the Bard's output lives so completely on in the twentieth century: all is war and lechery, lies and deceit.
Mendes cast Ralph Fiennes and Amanda Root as the wayward lovers in a brilliantly etched staging dominated by Simon Russell Beale's festering Thersites. Ian Judge turns to Fiennes minor, Joseph, and the new spitfire, Victoria Hamilton, in a more traditional panorama where Richard McCabe's curiously unmarked Thersites is demoted beneath Pandarus as a touchstone of debauchery. A fine second half, however, delivers the usual late twentieth century experience of encountering a thoroughly modern masterpiece.
Fiennes is a head-lolling, weepy-voiced victim of his own circumstances, goaded by experience into becoming a better soldier but a worse man. Hamilton's quicksilver Cressida, unencumbered by any interpretative agenda (unlike Juliet Stevenson's in 1985), shows simply a girl growing into a vixen, a creature Shaw said was Shakespeare's 'first real woman'.
These two lively new stars give colour and vivacity to their predicament, which is promoted at first by Clive Francis's camp and wheedling Pandarus. Francis appears to be imitating another Frankie altogether, the late one called Howerd. But his gruesome decline in the second half is a binding influence on a play that insidiously undermines the public show and display of the Greek and Trojan factions.
Greek general's wife Helen has been abducted by Paris. Seven years on, the protesting Greek army remains encamped at the walls of Troy, a stalemate beautifully suggested in John Gunter's design of a long, grey, battered corridor of iron and crumbling plasterboard facing two totemic shields, one a floating circle in a blood red sky, the other a standing oval in a forest of frozen spears. Ian Judge's staging is effectively fluid, the procession and battle scenes as spatially well-arranged as are the intimate encounters, here given operatic definition and gravity.
While generals discuss high stratagems and the philosophy of politics, appetite draws flesh to flesh: Cressida to Troilus, then to the hunky Greek Diomedes of Richard Dillane; Katia Caballero as a striking Helen to Ray Fearon's languid Paris - they emerge naked from the steam bath; and Philip Quast's imposingly well-spoken, bare-buttocked Achilles to his blond catamite Patroclus (Jeremy Sheffield), who looks as though he is en route from the Gladiators TV studio to the torture chamber in Voyeurz.
The Trojans include Griffith Jones's majestic Priam and a fine, impatient Hector from Louis Hilyer. The Greeks have an eccentrically bizarre and pouting Agamemnon from Edward de Souza ('We'll put on a form of strangeness as we pass along' is the evening's most unnecessary statement), and a definitive Ulysses from Philip Voss, who glories in every syllable of his speeches on order, and Time - who has a wallet on his back 'wherein he puts alms for oblivion'. What a play!
© Guardian Newspapers Ltd.
