TROILUS & CRESSIDA To 20 September.
London.
TROILUS & CRESSIDA
by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s Globe 21 New Globe Walk SE1 9DT In rep to 20 September 2009.
Runs 2hr 50min One interval.
TICKETS 020 7401 9919 or 020 7087 7398.
www.shakespeares-globe.org
Review: Carole Woddis 22 July.
A contemporary parallel too far.
Matthew Dunster has done many fine productions, notably at the Young Vic. But this most complex and scurvy of Shakespeare’s plays – the only one that deals in the Trojan wars - has him foxed. Last year Dunster directed Che Walker’s The Frontline at the Globe – an everyday story of today’s modern London. It was broad, brash and druggy, a great baggy pants of a play and production.
Dunster takes a similar approach to Troilus & Cressida, trying to turn it into a modern day story for our time about war’s folly and love’s disillusion. It’s handsome and crowd-friendly. But it doesn’t go nearly deep enough.
Everything in Troilus is scabrous. It should sit neatly with our disillusioned, celebrity-riddled times about the way things fall apart. But in playing it too camp and for laughs – Matthew Kelly’s Pandarus and Paul Hunter’s Thersites are two cases in point – we hardly get to see the centre of a play that lives and dies by contrasts: wisdom with arrogance, passion with indolence, innocence with cynical manipulation, youth with age.
Thus the story of Troilus’ unsullied love for Cressida is played out against a backdrop of the less than pure Paris/Helen attachment which has led to the years-long Greek siege of Troy. Lines about how fighting amongst themselves has led to the Greek prolongation of the siege shoot out in relation to our own `engagement’ in Afghanistan.
Dunster captures the play’s youthfulness without being able to match its world weary nihilism. Though there is a certain amount of good-looking `strutting’ about and Paul Stocker (Troilus) and Christopher Colquhoun (Hector) are respectively impressively ardent and honourable, few others carry sufficient weight.
A fiendishly deceptive script etched in brilliance with two speeches about Degree and Time spoken by Ulysses and delivered here in the unusually youthful person of Jamie Ballard, it defeats all but a few. Even Laura Pyper’s Cressida seems misconceived, too `knowing’ long before her betrayal of Troilus to her Greek captor, Diomedes. She is after all, a `spoil of war’. Shakespeare makes that plain enough. The remainder collapses into bitter gall.
Priam: Séamus O’Neill.
Hector: Christopher Colquhoun.
Paris: Ben Bishop.
Troilus: Paul Stocker.
Helenus: Jay Taylor.
Margareton/Calchas: Séamus O’Neill.
Pandarus: Matthew Kelly.
Aeneas: Fraser James.
Antenor: Stevie Raine.
Alexander/Menelaus: Richard Hansell.
Cassandra/Helen: Ania Sowinski.
Andromache: Olivia Chaney.
Cressida: Laura Pyper.
Agamemnon: Matthew Flynn.
Nestor: John Stahl.
Ulysses: Jamie Ballard.
Achilles: Trystan Gravelle.
Patroclus: Beru Tessema.
Ajax: Chinna Wodu.
Diomedes: Jay Taylor.
Thersites: Paul Hunter.
Soldiers’ Myrmidons/Servants: Jack Colgrave-Hirst, Mike Evans, Adam Karim, Toby Parkes, Joseph Scatley.
Musical Director, fiddle/bouzouki/ saz/percussion: Joe Townsend.
Accordion/santuri/kanun/harp/percussion: Jon Banks.
Voice/Harmonium: Olivia Chaney.
Percussion: Phil Hopkins.
Percussion: Genevieve Wilkins.
Clarinet/flute/zurna/percussion/soprano saxophone: Ian East.
Director: Matthew Dunster.
Designer: Anna Fleischle.
Composer: Olly Fox.
Choreographer: Aline David.
Fight director: Kevin McCurdy.
Movement work: Glynn MacDonald.
Voice and Dialect work: Jan Haydn Rowles.
Text work: Giles Block.
Assistant director: Monique Stirling.
Assistant designer: Alison McDowall.
Assistant text work: Rebecca Atkinson-Lord.
2009-07-28 11:32:28