It was not until after the First World War that the play finally received professional English-language productions. Robert Atkins’ 1923 production for the Old Vic marked the conclusion of producer Lilian Baylis’ project to stage all of Shakespeare’s known works, and the Morning Post was more interested in the presence of Princess Mary than the “vagaries”25 of the performance itself. Henry Herbert’s 1932 production at the Broadway Theater in New York, however, demonstrated increasing critical interest in the play. Here, “Cressida was played from Troilus’ point of view,”26 with her potential for treachery obvious from the start.

  With the onset of war, the play took on a new urgency. One newspaper, under the headline “Shakespeare’s Anti-War Play,” informed prospective audiences that “the play is essentially anti-war in its bias and implications. This, doubtless, was the basis of its popularity in Germany during the years of disillusionment prior to the advent of the Nazi regime.”27

  German theater makers had seen value in the play long before Fry, resurrecting it in Munich in 1898 and Berlin in 1899 and 1904. Ernst von Wolzogen’s 1898 production anticipated Poel in its attempt to recreate Elizabethan playing conditions, including the representation of Elizabethan spectators “presented as brutishly stupid,”28 but performed the play as farce and was a disaster, and Paul Lindau’s 1904 production at the Deutsches Theater was greeted with walkouts by an uncomprehending audience. In the wake of the First World War, however, the play took on a more political edge. Otto Falckenberg played Thersites in his own productions of 1925 and 1936 in Munich, undercutting traditional representations of the character as a simple clown by making him “a man utterly disillusioned,”29 providing scathing comment on the current political state of Germany.

  B. Iden Payne’s 1936 production at Stratford-upon-Avon was performed in the same political shadow, with one newspaper remarking on the “definite interest this parodied heroism holds for our day, when the shattering of reputations is not so much a sport as a habit.”30 Payne, following Poel, used Elizabethan costume and simple staging. Most praise was reserved for Pamela Brown’s Cressida, who “gave the giddy jilt a lisp, through which she contrived to convey a suggestion of levity and insincerity from the very beginning of her performance,”31 and for a Ulysses who “succeeded admirably in displaying the cynicism, the eloquence and the time-serving diplomacy of the character.”32 While not hugely successful, it was these cynical and unsentimental aspects of the play that increasingly captured attention, the play reflecting a growing public disillusionment. Two years later, contemporary resonances were further emphasized by Michael Macowan’s production at the Westminster Theatre. Utilizing modern dress, weaponry, and barbed wire in a direct confrontation of the national mood, the production occasioned a lengthy debate in The Times letter pages as academics argued that it was the first to truly demonstrate that “if ever there was a play for the times it is this.”33 It was a growing feeling that led to frequent postwar revivals of the play.

  Anthony Quayle’s 1948 Stratford production displayed a common trend to contrast “on the one side the licentious luxury of the Trojans and on the other the stern and serious soldiery of the Greeks.”34 Paul Scofield’s “delicate,” “sensitive,” and “emotional”35 Troilus, a role which has continually challenged actors, was singled out for praise, and the curtain fell on the image of him mourning Hector’s body.

  Pandarus’ epilogue, while having enjoyed a resurgence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, was long felt to be an inappropriate and weak ending to the play and often cut or, as here, moved to an earlier point, allowing the play to close on an emotional rather than a satiric note. Quayle returned to play Pandarus for Glen Byam Shaw in a 1954 production that “never allows the piece to seem too bitter … rightly emphasising that rather sad detachment which allows the ridiculous, the comic and the tragic to co-exist side by side.”36 With weak performances in the central roles, however, critics were unable to anchor their readings of the play in the sympathetic lovers, and it was the ugliness of Pandarus that left the biggest impression, Quayle “mincing, lisping, and gloating over the passions of his ‘Twoilus and Cwessida.’ ”37

  Tyrone Guthrie’s influential 1956 Old Vic production situated the play in the 1920s, where “soldiers’ fancy uniforms came straight from an Ivor Novello musical” and “the mighty Achilles wandered on in a dressing-gown, toying with a brandy balloon glass and a cigarette.”38 Guthrie’s satirical reading of the play targeted prevailing attitudes regarding war as heroic, recreating a prewar Britain which allowed him to draw “a parallel in the death of the Archduke and the theft of Helen as excuses for action.”39 Downplaying the physical and sexual elements of the play, Guthrie’s production recreated Troilus and Cressida in a world of socialites and superficiality that underscored the “military stupidity” of its leaders.

  Peter Hall and John Barton’s 1960 Stratford production (discussed in more detail below) reacted directly against the recent modern-dress productions, instead placing its classically costumed actors in an octagonal “sand pit,” allowing for an abstract and timeless representation of battlegrounds. Critics found Dorothy Tutin’s Cressida “a wisp of ripping carnality that is almost unbearably alluring,” while Max Adrian’s Pandarus’ “immense, dirty, quivering gusto”40 stole the show so successfully that reviewers questioned the function of Peter O’Toole’s more subdued Thersites. Hall revisited the play in 2001 with New York’s Theater for a New Audience, this time with a twelve-sided sandpit, in an unsuccessful production that needed “bold direction to point it one way or another.”41

  1. Anthony Quayle’s 1948 production: a “sensitive” and “emotional” Paul Scofield as Troilus, with Heather Stannard as Cressida.

  The Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival debuted Troilus in a 1963 production directed by Michael Langham which, despite poor audiences, featured strong performances and Martha Henry who “recognized that the key to Cressida’s character is that she has none, a point magnificently etched by an expression of frightening vacuity on her final exit.”42 The festival’s next version, directed by David Williams in 1987, attempted to mesh commentary on sexual politics (fetish gear, drag queens, and orgies) with commentary on colonial politics (an evocation of the British Raj, imagining the Trojans as Indians and the Grecians as empire-builders), but failed to satisfactorily address either.

  The play struggled on English-speaking stages through the 1970s and 1980s. Elijah Moshinsky’s 1976 National Theatre production at the Young Vic was pronounced “a maladroit failure.”43 In an intimate setting, the play struggled to find its focus amid an ensemble of strong performances: “emphasis goes to whoever has the power to secure it,”44 and reviewers looked in vain for coherence. Richard Cottrell’s 1979 production for the Bristol Old Vic was criticized for the same fault, and reviewers were not persuaded by the deliberate casting of actors rather less heroically statured than expected. John Wood’s production at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre in 1984 was visually striking with metallic sets evoking the Bronze Age, but sacrificed story to design. On television, Jonathan Miller’s 1981 adaptation for the BBC was a faithful retelling of the play, enlivened by some cheeky design references: the M*A*S*H-inspired Grecian camp, pin-ups of Lucas Cranach’s nudes in Ajax’s tent, and the incomplete wooden leg of the Trojan Horse in the background. Charles Gray’s Pandarus was weary rather than malicious, delivering his epilogue “with a terrifying, self-absorbed madness,”45 while Anton Lesser took advantage of the intimacy of the camera to present a more reflective Troilus than usual. The play was having more success in translation: Jeffrey Leavis and Deguchi Norio codirected a 1972 production for the Bungaku-ze Company set in ancient Japan, and the indeterminate setting of Dieter Dorn’s 1986 Munich production gave the impression of “something archaic and passionate, of eruptive ferocity barely restrained, of a primitive culture in its harsh exoticism.”46 For a play that battled to find a “voice” in performance, translation seemed to liberate its deeper, rawer aspects.

  Trevor Nunn’s 1999 production at the National Theatre marked a revival in the play’s fortunes on the cusp of the twenty-first century. He emphasized a cultural divide, casting white actors as the Grecians and black actors as Trojans. The sight of Sophie Okonedo’s delicate Cressida being “positively mauled” by the Grecian commanders upon her arrival in their camp was deliberately uncomfortable, and the play closed with “an image of her in grieving isolation,”47 finding its emotional core in this character’s devastation. However, it was the strong ensemble performances that captured the imagination of reviewers, with “the big ideals of honour and love … filtered through a wide variety of wartime lives.”48

  The subsequent decade saw four major productions in the UK, as well as growing interest internationally: Michael Bogdanov’s graphically sexual Troilus + Cressida provided Australia’s Bell Shakespeare Company’s biggest ever financial success in its 2000 run at Sydney Opera House’s Playhouse.49 Peter Stein directed a spectacular version for the Edinburgh International Festival in 2006 that was criticized for length and dullness, the lumbering set arguably more animated than the cast. Critics referred to Stein’s interpretation as “Romeo and Juliet in times of conflict,”50 an impression partially owing to the interpolation of a tragic death for Troilus at the end of the play: Pandarus brought Cressida in to beg forgiveness, a forgiveness that Troilus expressly denied her, instead turning and running into the spears of the waiting Myrmidons.

  Interest in the sexuality of the play has been increasingly apparent. In Andrew Hilton’s 2003 Tobacco Factory production,

  Ian Barritt’s majestically louche Pandarus is the central character of the play. Pale, fleshy, imperious and prurient, he’s a self-important old fruit who exists through the erotic and heroic life of others. He is, indeed, a “trader of the flesh,” and the phrase is a metaphor for the whole play. What is war but a trade in human flesh, where the profits are as monstrous and futile as the losses?51

  In 1954, one reviewer had asked of Shaw’s production “whether [Achilles’] unhealthy relationship with the effeminate Patroclus need have been quite so flagrantly and emphatically stressed by the producer.”52 By contrast, the “blatantly camp displays” of Richard Monette’s 2003 production at Stratford Ontario “failed to shock … and at the same time seemed pointlessly overdone.”53 By 2008 (Cheek by Jowl on tour) and 2009 (Shakespeare’s Globe), an openly gay Achilles was standard; both productions using the character to explore issues of sexual identity through his dual loves for the feminized Patroclus and the testosterone-fueled world of war. The Cheek by Jowl production, directed by Declan Donnellan, also featured a glamorous Helen “posing for photographs with the new man in her life, Paris, as if for a spread in Hello! Magazine,”54 epitomizing the emptiness of “love” in a world where true affection no longer had a place. Richard Cant’s Thersites, meanwhile, was “a drag-queen who enjoys nothing more than skittering around in high heels,”55 entertaining the Grecian troops with his cabaret act. This Thersites was reminiscent of the BBC’s casting of camp icon “The Incredible Orlando” in the role, who described his performance as “a scurvy railing bitch—a bit of a cow, really … she owns herself and doesn’t answer to anyone.”56

  In Matthew Dunster’s Globe production, the warlike Greeks contrasted with the comfort-oriented world of the Trojans, in which “semi-nude, doe-eyed servant boys pad about, risking a goosing from Matthew Kelly’s lecherously camp Pandarus.”57 Interestingly, and reminiscent of the focus of early twentieth-century reviewers, it was Laura Pyper’s Cressida who once again attracted the most attention. This purple-haired teenager’s combination of cynicism and naivety chimed with contemporary teenage attitudes; as she gave Diomedes Troilus’ sleeve, girls of a similar age in the auditorium gasped in shock, the sleeve being read as a modern “promise bracelet” whose attendant significance reverberated across the centuries. As the play continues to find new audiences and new resonances, it will no doubt continue to cement its claim as Shakespeare’s “play for the times.”

  AT THE RSC

  John Barton

  The RSC’s first three productions, in 1960, 1968, and 1976, were all directed by John Barton; the first in conjunction with Peter Hall and the last with Barry Kyle. They were very different, reflecting Barton’s developing ideas, and dividing critical opinion about a play still regarded as controversial.

  In 1960 Troilus and Cressida was fifth in a series of six plays that, according to the program notes, aimed to trace “the range, development and paradox of Shakespearean comedy.” Many critics quibbled with this classification and were taken aback by the set and effects:

  In years to come, no doubt, we shall look back and say, “ ‘Troilus and Cressida’? Ah, yes—that’s the one they did in sand and fog.” For all of the play … is performed on a circular arena of sand—a cockpit or a no man’s land for the interminable Greek-Trojan war—and the long battle scenes are wrapped in property smoke which swirls out into the auditorium.58

  Despite misgivings, the majority recognized how effective the set was: “Extraordinarily difficult to stage, it gets now as imaginative projection, as I remember, set upon a low octagonal platform covered with sand … and with a background device, by Leslie Hurry, that is the colour of dried blood.”59 Costumes were “traditional”: “armour and oiled bodies, sombre tones [gold and russet] assisting … in … contrasting of the opposing armies,”60 but the directors’ approach was not. After describing the play’s discrepancy between noble words and ignoble deeds, one reviewer suggested that “Shakespeare probably never even noticed the discrepancy,” before going on to analyze how the directors (still frequently referred to as “producers”) had made a play out of what he saw as Shakespeare’s failure:

  The producers have found the shape which Shakespeare himself missed; they have built upon a feeling that the universe is corrupt, and that worms triumph over nobility, a logical theatrical structure. The play contemplates lust and betrayal destroying grandeur. In the first part of the production, the spectacle is watched through the eyes of Max Adrian’s clever and repulsive Pandarus with a lecherous, lip-licking lascivious delight. In the second part Pandarus almost vanishes, and his place is taken by the ragged and filthy Thersites, in whom the continuation of the story, as well as his own degraded nature, inspires a spiritually vomiting disgust. We begin by finding the world and the sins that Shakespeare sees in it titillating; and in the end they make us spew.61

  The critic’s visceral response to the production captures the mind-set of the time, postwar, post-Suez debacle, post the theatrical revolution of the late 1950s’ “angry young men”: a society on the brink of the social revolution of the 1960s.

  John Barton’s next production in 1968—the year of student unrest in Europe and America—was even more uncompromisingly radical. His company notes, reprinted in the program, set out his reading of the play:

  The play is to some extent an attack on our cosy habit of generalising. We use abstract words like Honour, Fame, Beauty and Truth to sanction what we do and give ourselves a sense of order and meaning. We need these to smooth over the confusion of life, and to avoid acknowledging the chaos within ourselves … the Greeks are basically in touch with reality, and destructive, while the Trojans are self-destructive, romantic and blind.62

  Barton employed a totally bare set: “Apart from military standards and the intermittent couch, the players—servants, or soldiers masked in bronze—themselves institute the only settings we see.”63

  Response to his vision was a mixture of outrage and confused admiration; even those critics who admired it had reservations:

  Perhaps because Shakespeare labelled him a scurrilous Grecian, no one has trusted Thersites’s view of Troilus and Cressida as all wars and lechery. John Barton has now done so, and the result is the most coherent and impassioned version of the play I have yet seen.

  The other elements—honor, dignity, love—are there only to be poisoned. For once, Troilus and Cressida seems an uncomplicated, almost schematic work. It takes place under the emblem of a golden bull, symbolizing at once the Guernica-like carnage and the cuckolding of Menelaus that gives the war its pretext. And what the production shows is that all the Trojans and Greeks need is a pretext. There is no attempt—as in Mr. Barton’s 1960 production—to give the two sides separate characteristics. Off duty they were rogues of rough matting; on the battlefield they are almost naked. The encounter is voluptuous and both sides desire it.

  At first the production draws you into this infected atmosphere by glamorizing it—both in the balletic collisions of oiled bodies and at the very centre of the war on Helen’s vast bed. The Helen-Pandarus scene is usually played satirically but here Sheila Allen gives it an erotic charge that makes other matters seem unimportant compared with a shimmering golden robe and a hand exploring cheek.64

  Benedict Nightingale, like Irving Wardle, had reservations, despite what he describes as Barton’s “striking and daring aperçu that this war is a sort of lechery itself. War is sex and sex is war.”65 Most critics reacted unfavorably to the overt homosexuality of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus: “Achilles (Alan Howard) has been turned into a raging old queen in a gold wig and an embroidered fur coat.”66