Herbert Kretzmer suggested that the production “echoes some of the weighty splendours of this company’s ‘Wars of the Roses,’ ” but he, too, had misgivings:

  The lovers of the title played with fire and charm by Michael Williams and newcomer Helen Mirren are so swamped by magnificently staged battles, generous with gore and what seemed to me an overstressed concern with homosexuality in the warring camps of Greeks and Trojans.

  Costumes and armour are frequently and literally dropped to reveal men in a state of semi-nudity, roaring lustily at each other like Rugby players sharing a shower. I am not sure that all this rough stuff makes the play any more coherent. But it certainly provided rich opportunities for bravura performances by Alan Howard (Achilles), Patrick Stewart (Hector), Bernard Lloyd (Paris), Richard Moore (Ajax) and Norman Rodway as a hideous clown barnacled with boils, running sores and phallic symbols.

  Troilus and Cressida runs for something like 3½ hours and could with advantage lose 45 minutes of talk and five pints of artificial blood. But it remains a most impressive thing to see.67

  For his third attempt, in 1976, this time with Barry Kyle, Barton again recorded his thoughts in the program notes. His ideas about the play have moved on and his condemnation seems less outright:

  In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare invites tragic, comic, satiric, intellectual and compassionate responses almost at the same time. This shiftingness of view is also embodied in the play’s presentation of character. There is a very remarkable difference between the declared intentions of the characters and the actual deeds done by them. Again and again a character enunciates certain intentions and beliefs which are confounded by his actions … Again and again, a character who seems to be foolish or cruel or stupid turns up with something completely the opposite to one’s first view of him, and that seems to me to be not a chaotic view of human nature but a truthful and realistic one.68

  Many critics remembered his previous production—some only too well—and on the whole compared this one favorably with the last: “In his celebrated, and lamentably influential, production some years ago, John Barton reduced its various moods to garish nihilism. His new version (co-directed with Barry Kyle) goes some way towards making amends.”69 Michael Billington agreed that this production “trusts the play to yield up its own dark ambiguities. Last time round Barton seemed almost to be reading us a lecture on Shakespeare’s sexual disgust: this time the tone is saner, cooler, more balanced.”70

  The fixed wooden set comprising a jutting hexagonal stage and vertical beams was universally disliked. Billington was one of many to point out its limitations: “Visually the production is not much helped by the cramping timbered structure that this year hogs the Stratford stage.”71 The two sides on this occasion were carefully distinguished, though: the Greeks represented as “a bunch of arrogant greybeards,” the Trojans as “romantic young men who regard the war like a prolonged Test Match but display courage rather than heroism.”72

  Barton reprised certain elements from his previous production to no greater critical approval:

  Mr Barton carried over several features from his controversial 1968 version: the Trojans were virtually naked when they went into battle, and so were the Myrmidons throughout; Achilles was showily effeminate; Thersites was covered with bleeding sores and wore a grotesque mouth-shaped codpiece with a dangling red tongue/penis; Thersites and Pandarus had a song-and-dance routine for the epilogue. My objection to these things was not that they were offensive, as some found them, but that they distracted one from concentrating on that complicated language, without being closely enough related to the text to act as visual symbols of it.73

  J. W. Lambert also compared the two productions, and attempted to analyze the differences between them, although the representation of Achilles induced a queasy simile:

  When Mr Barton last directed “Troilus and Cressida” in 1968, he did so with due, not to say excessive regard for the fashion of the day—smoke, strobe-lighting, slow motion, barricades of buttocks, Achilles in drag and a fleeting glimpse of Helen Mirren in the nude. Sensationalism was all the go, hysteria the passport to paradise. Eight years on, though we still have smoke and slow motion for the battle scenes, the overall tone of this sardonic commentary on senseless war and the weakness of the flesh is very different. Shock tactics have been replaced by ironic invention, comic and otherwise.

  2. John Barton’s 1976 production, with several features carried over “from his controversial 1968 version: the Trojans were virtually naked when they went into battle.”

  Oriental, solemn, ceremonious Trojans confront Greeks who are all bemused or crafty old shepherds in funny straw hats, except oafish Ajax, a Diomed played by Paul Shelley as a sharp career officer—and of course Achilles, the unscrupulous aristocrat among the yeomanry: far more effeminate than Paul Moriarty as his catamite Patroclus, Robin Ellis’s sulking prince is a degenerate echo of Alan Howard’s tortured assumption in 1968, a writhing, fleshly bully who nibbles and sucks at his words like a fish caressing some putrescent morsel at the mouth of a sewer.

  His Trojan rival Hector, on the other hand, is played by Michael Pennington with a blade-straight vocal and physical line which nevertheless easily encompasses his inconsistent, unkind chivalry.74

  Roger Warren concludes that, despite his reservations, “it was a consistently interesting and absorbing occasion … Whatever Mr Barton’s over-emphasis or over-ingenuity, he enabled his cast to bring out the ‘shifting’ ambiguous quality of much, at least, of the play, and certainly much more than in his previous version.”75

  After Barton

  In 1981 Terry Hands staged the play at the Aldwych. Irving Wardle suggested that the fundamental difference was Hands’ rejection of Barton’s intellectualized approach to play and characters:

  What Mr Hands has done is to release them from any binding directorial concept and give them the chance to live to the full on their own terms—apparently in the hope that if a pattern does emerge it will be Shakespeare’s.76

  This ad hoc approach to the text produced inconsistent results:

  Strong performances and interesting interpretation alternated with excess and confusion. Farrah’s designs were equally typical, a hotchpotch of the modern, the medieval, and (occasionally) the Greek: barbed wire, greatcoats and harmonica music of the trenches clashed against helmets with elaborate hinged visors, armour and sabres.77

  Michael Billington thought that “If one can deduce any message from Mr Hands’ production, it is that the play is about the moral chaos induced by exhaustion.”78 Playing for comedy, the play’s satirical edge was missing.

  Howard Davies’ production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1985 offered politics and history with comic and tragic overtones. Setting was crucial:

  Ralph Koltai has designed a single set, consisting of the white interior of a nineteenth-century mansion three quarters smashed by war. Peeling pictures, broken shutters, a chandelier and some fallen curtains hung crazily above a grandiose staircase. By turns Trojan and Greek, public and private, conference chamber and troops’ taverna, it placed us on the shores of the Black Sea in the 1850s. This context had, of course, more than merely geographical appropriateness to recommend it. It invoked the Crimean War in order to make us think, simultaneously, of the heroic idealism of the Charge of the Light Brigade and the brutal reality of the wards at Scutari.79

  John Peter argued that the decision to update the play had a sound rationale:

  The Crimean War was one of the last armed conflicts in which old-fashioned individual gallantry still had some meaning; and this sense, of personal courage and honest chivalry at their last gasp in the roar of impersonal and disillusioned warfare, fits perfectly the mood of this complex, questioning and angry play.80

  Dubbed a “feminist” production, the most controversial aspect was Juliet Stevenson’s performance as Cressida (discussed below). Irving Wardle argued that “The prevailing tone was comic, going much beyond the bitterly sardonic into the region of gags and belly-laughs.” He saw the key performance in this interpretation as Alun Armstrong’s Thersites, “a Geordie clown in thick-pebble glasses, characteristically seen parading up and down as Agamemnon wearing a saucepan helmet which he then cannot get off.”81

  The 1990 production in the Swan theater marked the RSC directorial debut of the twenty-four-year-old Sam Mendes and established his reputation. The uniformly strong playing of his ensemble cast enabled Mendes to create “a bleakly comic version of the play”82 in

  a temporal no man’s land where Greek helmets, khaki, and anglepoise lamps can co-exist. As in The Wasteland, the horror is not passed off here as a little local unpleasantness, but is felt to be happening in all ages at once, Thermopylae contemporary with Passchaendale. The eclecticism of design also provides ideal conditions for satiric deflation.83

  Cressida (Amanda Root) dabbled her feet in a paddling pool, in which the Trojan soldiers ceremoniously washed their swords and faces after the day’s fighting. Pandarus framed the play:

  The prologue was given to the blazered Pandarus of Norman Rodway (“armed” in a medal to which he pointed with a challenging twinkle), and spoken with a crisp intelligence and wit that marked much of the evening. Pandarus’ helpful remarks to “all tongue-tied maidens here” ended the first half of the play before the intermission, so that, with the epilogue too, he framed the evening, his jaunty, dressy start, medial salaciousness, and final diseased decrepitude marking the progress of the play.84

  The direction was critically acclaimed:

  There were scenes of brilliantly directed theatricality too: the Greek generals scruffy and murky in council behind their long upstage table contrasted with the brilliantly lit elegance of the Trojans, seated round the perimeter of the playing space, the theatre become debating chamber, under the chairmanship of the patriarchal figure of Griffith Jones’s Priam, in octogenarian splendour in white naval uniform.85

  Mendes employed small, original directing touches to clarify the narrative and the significance of the individuals caught up in it:

  time and again Mendes worked with remarkable economy. The addition of the moment of the exchange of Antenor for Cressida, for instance, became another ritual, familiar from spy-films perhaps but still powerful, particularly in the warm welcome Antenor received, defining neatly the unimportance of Cressida for the Trojans.86

  3. Sam Mendes’ 1990 production, with Amanda Root as Cressida and a blazered Norman Rodway as Pandarus, dabbling their feet in a paddling pool “in which the Trojan soldiers ceremoniously washed their swords and faces after the day’s fighting.”

  Very much a company play, it was the extraordinary performance of Simon Russell Beale, who confesses that he “didn’t have a great deal of enthusiasm for Thersites to begin with,”87 which was singled out:

  The chief glory of the evening is Simon Russell Beale’s hilariously repulsive performance as Thersites … Hunchbacked, rheumy-eyed and limping, and wearing a greasy raincoat, Russell Beale savours every syllable of his character’s scabrous sneers and jibes persuading the audience to laugh the possibility of human decency to scorn.88

  Ian Judge was, as many critics pointed out, an unlikely choice of director for the next RSC production in 1996:

  Ian Judge openly rejoices in his richly deserved reputation as a director of popular (possibly populist) productions of Shakespeare’s comedies; so his choice as a director of Troilus and Cressida caused a good deal of speculation, some of it hostile in anticipation. In the event, this was an earnest, somewhat old-fashioned evening in the theatre, replicating many of the devices that have attached themselves to the play in successive RSC stagings (men in tight leather, clouds of smoke, campy performances as Pandarus, Achilles, and Patroclus).89

  In the program notes, Judge argued that the play is “a complete one-off. It’s a comedy, but the nature of that comedy is to do with how we keep ourselves alive in a world so intolerable and bleak.”90 Critics were not entirely convinced by the nudity, bare buttocks, and humor, but felt that the tragedy of the second half worked better:

  The scene-setting Prologue was delivered by Richard McCabe as if he were a TV warm-up man. Clive Francis plays the ringleted Pandarus as if he were Frankie Howerd in a camp sitcom called Up Phrygia. And the great scenes of debate among the Greeks and Trojans were relentlessly busy in a way that obscured the density of their arguments about military tactics and moral honour.

  But when it gets to the heart of the matter, Judge’s production calms down; and what it brings out, with growing assurance, is the destructiveness of time which is the noun which reverberates through the play.91

  Michael Boyd’s 1998 production, which opened at the Barbican Pit before transferring to the Swan, updated the play’s setting but left many critics confused about its exact whereabouts:

  Boyd’s powerful but perplexing staging opens with sepia photographs of soldiers, suggesting that we are on the Western Front during the First World War. Then you notice that a lot of the characters have Irish accents. The Irish Civil War perhaps? Then it becomes clear that while the Trojans are Irish, the Greeks are British. The IRA versus the Black and Tans? The shelled Roman Catholic chapel which dominates Tom Piper’s spare but highly atmospheric set, seems to confirm this impression, but why, then, does Achilles look like a present-day Serbian war-crimes thug, and Ajax resemble a particularly dim heavy-metal rock star?

  What Boyd is presumably trying to suggest is any war-torn territory in which fine words cover vile actions.92

  Boyd added a number of directorial touches: Patroclus (Elaine Pyke) was killed by the Greeks, not Hector, Cassandra carried around a black shawl wrapped up to suggest a dead child, and Thersites was played as a “filthy cross between a war photographer and a bowler-hatted music-hall clown.”93

  For the Complete Works Festival, the distinguished German director Peter Stein’s production in association with the RSC opened at the Edinburgh festival in 2006. His first ever English-language production, described as “huge, beautiful and stately,”94 was dedicated to Barton’s 1968 production from which it took inspiration.

  “As False as Cressid” (3.2.184)

  Like Romeo and Juliet, the play tells the story of a love affair doomed by a hostile environment. But Troilus is more like an early narcissistic Romeo, and Cressida doesn’t die but is handed over to the enemy and is unfaithful. Her name becomes, as Pandarus prophesies, a byword for infidelity. The part represents a challenge for any actor, especially Act 4 Scene 5 when Cressida arrives in the Greek camp. Edith Evans made her debut in the role in William Poel’s 1912 production and established her distinguished professional career. It is notable how frequently the actor playing the role has been singled out for her performance, often against the critics’ better judgment and by playing against contemporary ideas about the character.

  Many critics were surprised by the sexiness of Dorothy Tutin’s interpretation in 1960, but even more that she played Cressida sympathetically:

  Thersites comes near to the truth about Cressida when he calls her a “commodious drab.” Hazlitt speaks of her as “a giddy girl, an unpractised jilt,” and Agate put it on record that he thought Cressida “an impossible part, requiring a personality to launch whole navies and burn the topless towers of a hundred cities.”

  Dorothy Tutin’s personality could launch atomic navies; and if she has not the power to burn whole cities, then she is certainly capable of giving them a good singeing. Her Cressida is a performance of smouldering voluptuousness, physical in essence with sensuous walk, heaving breast and passionate eyes. Emotionally there are moments of eloquence, yet there is a niceness about this Cressida which jars on the amoral picture of Shakespeare’s wanton. Miss Tutin seems to wish us to believe that this travesty of virtue has some real moral conscience. It is to her great credit that she almost succeeds.95

  Reviews of Barton’s 1968 production are mainly too obsessed and/or incensed by Alan Howard’s Achilles to worry much about Helen Mirren’s Cressida. Benedict Nightingale objects that “Miss Mirren has nothing to do with the Cressida described by Ulysses, the only voice in the play we can trust.” He tells us that “Her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motion of her body” before objecting that Mirren just isn’t “wanton” enough in “the joints, not to mention the motions.”96 W. A. Darlington offers a more thoughtful response:

  4. Dorothy Tutin as Cressida with David Buck as Diomedes, 1960: “Her Cressida is a performance of smouldering voluptuousness, physical in essence with sensual walk, heaving breast and passionate eyes.”

  In John Barton’s present production at Stratford-on-Avon Helen Mirren has a very clear and to me original reading. She makes the girl shallow-pated rather than wicked and establishes this in her first scene with Pandarus. During her love-scenes with Troilus she convinces herself of her own sincerity and is all the more vehement in its defence because she really knows how little depth she has.

  Arrived in the Greek camp, she gives herself away to the wise Ulysses by the increasing pleasure with which she responds to her new host’s very warm welcome and it is easy to see that her devotion to Troilus will not last.97

  Francesca Annis’ performance in 1968 drew much favorable comment, although critics were disconcerted by the “stock courtesan mask, fitted to the back of her head-dress, which she suddenly revealed as she walked off at the end of the betrayal scene.” Roger Warren goes on to suggest: