Unlike Romeo And Juliet, in which one of the two principals is rarely offstage, Troilus and Cressida are hardly in Troilus and Cressida: the play contains their story but it isn’t really about them. Set ten years into the Trojan wars, Shakespeare’s play is about men in a man’s world.
Contrasting versions of masculinity are on show in both camps in Matthew Dunster’s compelling production at the Globe theatre. It may be because the Greeks have been camped outside Troy for a decade but most of the men seem more interested in winding up and scoring points off each other than the actual fighting. ‘Twas ever thus?
Agamemnon, a shrewd performance from Matthew Flynn, is a very modern and calculating commander-in-chief while Chinna Wodu takes the audience on every step of Ajax’s journey from valiant ox to the preening popinjay who believes his own hype. The departure from reality for most celebrities coincides with the moment they begin to refer to themselves in the third person as much as Achilles, the superstar of the Greek army, played with consummate vanity by Trystan Gavelle. Paul Stocker keeps the Trojans’ ends up and his muscular Troilus sets a fair few hearts a-fluttering among the groundlings as well as Laura Pyper’s elfin Cressida.
As in life, not all the play’s men are warriors and two of the most interesting performances come from Matthew Kelly’s unctuous Pandarus (Cressida’s uncle), who not so much sets up as pimps out his very young niece to Troilus and Paul Hunter’s Thersites, a Greek fool / servant, through whose eyes the audience get more than a glimpse of the futility of the endless internecine warring.
The ongoing theme of this year’s Globe season is: ‘Young Hearts. The tragedy of this latest excellent episode is that, on both sides in the war, there are plenty of men old enough to know better. ‘Twas definitely ever thus.
Troilus and Cressida is running until 20 September.
http://www.shakespeares-globe.org
