This is a play that notoriously defies categorization. It is as baffling a work as its author ever wrote -- and may well have baffled him as well as us. Not that he stinted on language: it is the third-longest play in the canon (after Hamlet and Richard III; and its enormous number of neologisms increase the difficulties facing an audience. Apart from Dryden's radical refashioning, Troilus And Cressida seems not to have been performed until our own century. In recent decades, however, directors have regarded it as a badge of honor to mount the play -- failing more often than not. Of the productions I have seen over the years, only the one at the 1987 Stratford Festival in Ontario was wholly satisfactory and consistent.
The Royal National Theatre's head man, Trevor Nunn, has now risen to the challenge with his revival in the large Olivier Theatre. It certainly does not entirely succeed, but it does hold the attention and is visually handsome. Designer Rob Howell has provided a huge circle of blood-colored sand in front of upstage sliding panels, with a stylized tent roof dropping in from time to time. Nunn often uses aisles through the audience for the frequent entrances and exits of the warring soldiers, who seem more numerous than they actually are. Nunn has hit on one inspired way of clarifying who is who in the lengthy and confusing roster of characters: he has cast the Trojans with black actors (garbed in white), and the Greeks with white actors.
The titular Trojan lovers present us with a gorgeous tall Cressida (Sophie Okonedo), hair falling to waist and hips given to swiveling, and a smashingly attractive Troilus (Peter de Jersey), who is a superb and subtle verse speaker to boot. Troilus elicits a little bit of sympathy, though like Cressida he sleeps around freely (there are no completely sympathetic people in this bitterly cynical play). Some things remain strikingly in the memory: the parasol-carrying Pandarus (David Bamber) in the "true and not true" scene; the foul-mouthed, doll-toting Thersites (Jasper Britton) beating and banging on the ground; the tall, pigtailed Achilles (Raymond Coulthard) kissing the dead lips of his short lover Patroclus (Daniel Evans); the burly Ajax (Simon Day) covered with boils; and, at the very end, Cressida left all alone in a gradually dimming spotlight. Gary Yershon has composed an appropriate score for keyboard, wind and percussion played live by six musicians.
