TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. To 14 June.
London.
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
by William Shakespeare.
Barbican Theatre To 14 June 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.15pm Mat Sat 2.30pm.
Runs 3hr 15min One interval.
TICKETS: 0845 120 7511 (transaction fee).
www.barbican.org.uk/bite (reduced booking fee).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 31 May.
Shakespeare revealed by flashes of lightning.
This play’s like a real-world Romeo and Juliet. Except its lovers seem insignificant by the end. They’re hardly the big picture, which is the Trojan War at a midpoint stalemate. Outside, the Greeks are falling apart. In Troy, the lovers get together for one night only. And Cressida’s uncle Pandarus spends his time matchmaking.
It’s a War and Peace play, with conflict erupting in the second half. Thersites, Shakespeare’s bitter commentator, has no individual to love or feel jealous about, so he provides a dyspeptic view of the Trojan War, reducing it to the story of “a whore and a cuckold”.
He seems to speak for Shakespeare. Director Declan Donnellan joins in with gusto. The Greeks mock Menelaus, a weak, silent character, whose wife they’re all fighting to recover from Troy. Greek hero Ulysses’ studious manner and academic hesitation don’t hide the underlying determination and cold purpose of a ruthless apparatchik.
Ryan Kiggell’s speech on the Greeks’ disorder brilliantly shows Ulysses aware he’s saying something unpopular with an audience he needs to win over. The characterisation is less at home when Ulysses joins in the Greeks’ baiting of Cressida.
Such contrasts recur. Donnellan looks freshly at everything and when it works the impact’s thrillingly revelatory. So with the Prologue, given to Helen (of Troy) who floats with smiling abandon among a line of soldiers frozen mid-advance like terracotta troops. The cause of all the woe, she flits around as if absolutely charmed with the thrilling spectacle of war, oblivious to suffering or her own responsibility.
Such insights are clogged by over-indulgences like Thersites’ soon-tedious cabaret drag-act and the relentless nastiness of all but the fated hero Hector. Diomedes, especially, is thuggish, an unlikely new love for Lucy Briggs-Owen’s happy innocent of a Cressida. Alex Waldmann is excellent as her lover, less redolent of the warrior Troilus reputedly is.
It’s fine to play against expectations, but there’s a point where credulity’s over-stretched or a picture becomes over-grey. And there’s some rough verse-speaking for an ensemble of this stature. But those are the rough edges that go with the originality and insight.
Agamemnon: Anthony Mark Barrow.
Achilles/Priam: Paul Brennen.
Cressida/Andromache: Lucy Briggs-Owen.
Thersites/Calchas: Richard Cant.
Hector: David Caves.
Paris/Menelaus: Oliver Coleman.
Pandarus: David Collings.
Alexander/Helenus: Gabriel Fleary.
Diomedes: Mark Holgate.
Nestor: Damian Kearney.
Ulysses: Ryan Kiggell.
Aeneas: Tom McClane.
Helen/Cassandra: Marianne Oldham.
Patroclus: David Ononokpono.
Ajax: Laurence Spellman.
Troilus: Alex Waldmann.
Director: Declan Donnellan.
Designer: Nick Ormerod.
Lighting: Judith Greenwood.
Sound: Gregory Clarke.
Music: Catherine Jayes.
Movement: Jane Gibson.
Company voice work: Patsy Rodenburg.
Fight director: Paul Benzing.
Assistant director: Owen Horsley.
2008-06-03 12:36:00