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Cheek by Jowl Theatre Company presents TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Declan Donnellan Lighting by Judith Greenwood
Barbican Theatre
22 May - 14 June 08
A review by David Hermann for EXTRA! EXTRA!
Sex and war. That’s what it’s all about. Love and death are byproducts. Such is the message, and you’d expect it to come from the terminal disillusionment of 1990s Sarah Kane or Mark Ravenhill, but this is Shakespeare in 1602, commenting on Western society’s defining legend, the Trojan War. Should you prefer to save yourself a short history of the Shakespearean problem play I suggest you skip the following two paragraphs. In 1896, Troilus and Cressida was classed as a ‘problem play’ by the influential critic and scholar F. S. Boas, who had spent years examining the work of that most prominent exponent of the problem play, his contemporary Henrik Ibsen. Should you ever need to explain to someone exactly how far Shakespeare was ahead of his time, just consider the fact that Boas found it necessary to adapt the modern term ‘problem play’ to aid in the understanding of a playwright who had been dead for 280 years! To simplify grossly, Troilus and Cressida is a problem play because the eponymous characters, although subjects and objects in tragedy, do not die at the end of the play, and are thus removed from tragedy’s general mechanism of guilt and retribution. Rather, Cressida and Troilus exemplify a universal state of affairs - a problem - and live on. As does the problem. Declan Donnellan has done admirably well to embolden one central message put forward by this confusingly complex play. In war, the deeds of a hero, however valiant, will never outweigh the banality of bloodshed. In what seems to be a radically different approach to the character of Hector, David Caves portrays the diplomatic Trojan prince as a sanctimonious man of the hour driven by ambition rather than good will. Meanwhile, the brilliantly tragicomic Alex Waldmann plays Troilus as a spoilt, ebullient runt who scampers athwart the traverse stage with the obscene vivacity of a retriever-pup. Lucy Briggs-Owen offers a fine Cressida, reminiscent of the defiantly ignorant Paris Hilton-archetype, forever suspended in limbo between virgin and whore; between light-hearted banter and tragic desperation. In the words of Joyce Carol Oates, Troilus and Cressida “strikes the modern reader as a contemporary document” (Oates, 1966/67), and the famous and fantastically successful Cheek by Jowl have stripped this “most vexing and ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays” (Oates, again) of its befuddling multitude of messages, streamlining the plot and giving it a definitive and suitably modern hue. Please go and see this spectacular full-length Shakespeare in its only UK-run before it moves on to stun and delight audiences across the globe!
Tickets: £25 Extra seats now available Barbican Centre, London 0845 120 7550 Troilus and Cressida comes to the Barbican as part of an international tour.
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