Smoke gets in your eyes ARTS
HILARY SPURLING
The Royal Shakespeare Company's new Troilus and Cressida is directed by John Barton and set, for the most part with great splendour, by Timothy O'Brien. It starts superbly, with a compliment to ti■at astonishing production of the same play br the same company eight years ago—only the burly black Tudor knight has given way to a Greek prologue, posed as on a painted vase, masked, cloaked and helmeted in scarlet. The harsh lighting, the brilliant white cockpit and the black emptiness beyond remain the same. And inevitably this production prompts a feeling that the great stylistic revo- lution, pioneered by Messrs Hall and Brooke at Stratford has passed its prime. And that, as styles pass, they seem, like Pandarus's funny story, to take a great while going by.
More sinister is the fact that these things are catching. Take, for instance, the minute, coquettish pleated kilts, worn like cake frills round the waist by the Greek and Trojan princes: the fashion for bare bottoms, which caused such excitement when the Marat/Sade was seen on Broadway, has been gaining ground rapidly on the London stage in recent months and is by no means over yet. Or take smoke. It has traditionally belched across the Stratford stage, from English, Scottish, French, Danish, even Roman cannon, as steam at Timon's supper table, as fumes from Hecate's cauldron, as river mists in Arden and now, on Mr O'Brien's classical battlefield, presumably as the dust clouds of the Phrygian plain. Already, in The Skin of Our Teeth at Chichester two weeks ago, it has begun to invade the com- mercial stage; and I have no doubt that, before very long, we shall see a whole series of West End productions of Wilde, Shaw and Ibsen set against the gaping void favoured for the past eight years at Stratford, and wreathed in smoke from beneath the sofa cushions.
Long before that, of course, the style of which these are two minor attributes will have been-superseded by another. For the moment, it seems at Stratford to be sinking fast into a period of decorative decadence: 'I had rather BE a tick in a sheep than SUCH A valiant ignorance.' Thus Thersites, and his delivery, as of a ticket-punch gone wrong, is by no means untypical. What was once, only a few years ago, a new way of speaking Shakespeare—a manner of great intellectual and emotional power, and scrupulously attentive to the text— is now no longer even functional. What is one to make, for instance, of Ulysses' remark— presumably a reference to Achilles' secret and treacherous bargain with the Trojan queen— when it sounds like this: 'All the COMMERCE thatyouhavehadwithTroyas PERFECTLY isoursas- yoursmylord'? Too much of this production sounds like Chinese whispers.
Elsewhere the decline is similarly abrupt; on Shakespeare's bawdy, for example, the RSC have long been your only men. Here, in a pro- duction loaded with tableaux of copulation between all likely and unlikely partners, their clumsiness in this line is especially depressing. Remember Feste and Mercutio in the subtle, humorous and inventive hands of Norman Rodway. As Thersites, his fingers are all
thumbs. Watch him straddling Achilles from behind while that hero's casual greeting, 'Art thou come?' is delivered as the climax to a chorus of hoarse ejaculations from the myrmidons; the ornate vulgarity of this episode is not so much comical or sour or even squalid as absurdly pompous.
A pomposity hopelessly at odds with the text. But this kind of pedantic condescension runs through the whole production. If the images of concupiscence and lust, of 'the devil Luxury with his fat rump and potato finger,' are cheapened, the grave argument which forms the second strand of the play becomes equally insipid. The two great debates on the war, in Act 3, remind one of nothing so much as Kavanagh's 'Who Killed James Joyce?'
'What weapon was used To slay mighty Ulysses? The weapon that was used Was a Harvard thesis.'
Much of this will no doubt be put right with time. Certainly some of the performances— notably Sebastian Shaw's woefully incoherent Ulysses and Helen Mirren's Cressida whose timing, not helped by an over-excited Pandarus, was sadly out in the first half of the play—seem severely under-rehearsed. But no amount of time will correct the basic shape of this pro- duction. After his indecisive and ornate begin- nings, Mr Barton has simply settled for com- pany standing orders on Shakespeare's fifth act battles. But this war is-not quite like any of the others. For one thing it has already lasted seven years. For Troilus and Cressida it must have been the daily background to all their adult lives; it is interrupted, even on the field, for drinking, boasting, mutual compliments and gossip; the ladies watch it from the walls or do their best, if not to keep their heroes home in bed, at any rate to make them late. The final slaughter is not a climax in the usual sense—it begins like any other day for everyone but Troilus. Or at least it would do, if the com- pany were not so bent on following standard practice.
It is at this point that the fussiness of this production becomes peculiarly tiresome. The complex nocturne for five voices outside Calchas's tent is overshadowed by an orgy expertly inserted between one line and the next, so that while Achilles (Alan Howard) dressed in drag is making eyes at Hector, Troilus's ugly disillusionment is tucked unobtrusively away in another part of the field. Not that this Troilus—played with extreme perversity by
Michael Williams as a baffled Lost Boy from Peter Pan—is in any position to make much of his humiliation at Cressida's hands. In- evitably the scene loses its undertones of rank sexual cruelty, of smirched idealism and bitter pain. Miss Mirren at this point catches Cressida to perfection—caressing Diomed with a feverish lasciviousness, at once urgent and pathetically inexperienced; Troilus behaves as if someone had pinched his marbles. And once we have seen him bury his head in Ulysses' lap at a moment when the play's rhythm. not to mention his own words, demands a mood of hard and adult savagery—once this turning point is muffed, no wonder if the battle scenes seem a trifle desultory.
By the time the production returns, too late, to the lines laid down eight years ago, the damage can be plainly seen : the death of Hector comes as a blurred version of that chilling moment in the earlier production when the myrmidons=noseless, handless, hacked and chipped'—converged from nowhere on their victim to butcher him in silence. Perhaps because of their earlier antics, these myrmidons somehow count for very little: and, since Achilles' relationship to Hector is more coy flirt than coward, his final act of cowardice falls strangely flat.
One is left with a handful of images—Susan Fleetwood's Cassandra who brings to her two beautifully disciplined scenes that sombre note —`a hell of pain'—heard nowhere else in this production; Richard Moore as a deliciously comic, susceptible and loutish Ajax; and a glimpse of John Kay's Priam, squatting on the floor cross-eyed with worry while his sons debate the conduct of the war. Ben Kingsley's Aeneas and John Shrapnel's Patroclus are admirably done. But for the most part Mr Barton seems to have moved dangerously far from the lucid subtlety of his Julius Caesar earlier this year, in a direction, like Achilles', both 'overproud and underhonest.'
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