This gross schematic ostentation flatly contradicted both the ambiguity of Cressida’s feeling, and Francesca Annis’s subtle presentation of it … certainly Troilus and Cressida for the first time in my experience held the center of their play. Francesca Annis perfectly caught the “slipper” changeability of Cressida, sophisticated one moment, the next giving intense value to the haunting solemnity with which Cressida swears truth,

  When time is old and hath forgot itself,

  When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy.

  This scene, with its magnificent juxtaposition of present and future, and of passionate seriousness and bawdy wit, was the high point of the play, superbly realized by Miss Annis, David Waller’s expert Pandarus, and Mike Gwilym’s coherent and un-mannered Troilus.98

  Carol Royle, fresh from TV soap opera, was an unusual choice for Cressida in Hands’ 1981 production but was nevertheless widely praised for the “intelligence and fire”99 she brought to Cressida. In an interview with Linda Christmas, Royle discussed her approach to the role:

  On first reading, I didn’t find her a calculating woman, though I can see an element of that in her. But on the whole I’m still inclined to see her as a victim. She is a lady full of doubts, and she behaves the way she does because of the situation she is in and the society in which she lives.

  Troilus seems to be giving her away to the Grecian camp. He doesn’t want her to go but he lets her go because it gives him tactical military advantage. And then she falls in lust, not love, with Diomedes and has to admit that fidelity is not part of her make-up at all.100

  Juliet Stevenson’s performance in Davies’ 1985 production was controversial, and she has herself explained how hard it can be to interpret Shakespeare’s women onstage and the desire to “react against the way tradition and prejudice have stigmatised them.”101 The updating of the play, however, allowed Stevenson scope to reinterpret the role: “Cressida, more interestingly, was re-read as a serious nineteenth-century New Woman whose infidelity reflected, not moral weakness, but her status as the victim of an aggressively masculine culture.”102 The staging of her arrival in the Greek camp was much commented upon:

  When she arrived at the Greek camp, the generals subjected her to brutally violent kisses that amounted to assault. At first appalled, she soon began to play their game, a point brilliantly made when Ulysses asked for his kiss: “Why, beg then,” she replied tartly, snapping her fingers to indicate that he should kneel. She had become a love-object after all.103

  Amanda Root’s Cressida in 1990 was seen by Benedict Nightingale as “too knowing, too calculating, too Greek,”104 but Martin Hoyle argued that

  Amanda Root’s Cressida has the ambiguity of youth. She can turn and swivel without losing sympathy, especially as Sam Mendes’ production subscribes to the current theory of the helpless girl responding to Diomedes through sheer panic. Her welcome by the appreciative Greek camp is heavy with the threat of rape, however much at odds this is with the self-possessed pertness of her lines at this point.105

  5. Juliet Stevenson as Cressida, 1985: “When she arrived at the Greek camp, the generals subjected her to brutally violent kisses that amounted to assault.”

  In 1996 Victoria Hamilton’s performance was recognized by many critics as the production’s “triumph. Her girlish Cressida is not the usual inconstant flirt with both eyes on the main chance, but a serious, self-possessed girl, delighted by first love”:106

  The evening’s secret weapon is Victoria Hamilton’s Cressida, whose steamy affair with Troilus … strikes a lipsmacking note of opportunism, desperation and lust.107

  In Michael Boyd’s 1998 production,

  Jayne Ashbourne looking like a delightfully plump and flirtatious barmaid in a rural Irish pub, touchingly captures Cressida’s awareness of her own shop-soiled morality, while the effectively choreographed scene in which she is forcibly kissed by the Greek generals is almost as shocking as a gang rape.108

  This scene was striking and effective, although a number of critics felt that the “exaggeratedly expressionistic artifice” of the tango was at odds with the “naturalistic acting” style.109

  Two women, Cressida and Helen, are at the heart of this play about love and war. Ideas about the play and interpretations of these roles have changed with ideas about women’s place in culture and society. Young women actors have succeeded with Cressida, going beyond the shallow stereotype to suggest how her life is defined by social positioning and determined by gender. The added sympathy and complexity of their interpretations has fundamentally changed critical perceptions of Cressida, the role of women, and the play itself.

  THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH MICHAEL BOYD AND TREVOR NUNN

  Michael Boyd was born in Belfast in 1955, educated in London and Edinburgh, and completed his MA in English literature at Edinburgh University. He trained as a director at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow. He then went on to work at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, joining the Sheffield Crucible as associate director in 1982. In 1985 Boyd became founding artistic director of the Tron theater in Glasgow, becoming equally acclaimed for staging new writing and innovative productions of the classics. He was drama director of the New Beginnings Festival of Soviet Arts in Glasgow in 1999. He joined the RSC as an associate director in 1996 and has since directed numerous productions of Shakespeare’s plays. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director for his version of the Henry VI plays in the RSC’s “This England: The Histories” in 2001. He took over as artistic director of the RSC in 2003 and oversaw the extraordinarily successful Complete Works Festival in 2006–07. His own contribution to this, and the company’s subsequent season, was a cycle of all eight history plays, from Richard II through to Richard III, with the same company of actors. This transferred to London’s Roundhouse Theatre in 2008 and won multiple awards. Here he answers questions about his production of Troilus and Cressida for the RSC in 1998.

  Sir Trevor Nunn is the most successful and one of the most highly regarded of modern British theater directors. Born in 1940, he was a brilliant student at Cambridge, strongly influenced by the literary close reading of Dr. F. R. Leavis. At the age of just twenty-eight he succeeded Peter Hall as artistic director of the RSC, where he remained until 1978. He greatly expanded the range of the company’s work and its ambition in terms of venues and touring. He also achieved huge success in musical theater and subsequently became artistic director of the National Theatre in London. His productions are always full of textual insights, while being clean and elegant in design. Among his most admired Shakespearean work has been a series of tragedies with Ian McKellen in leading roles: Macbeth (1976, with Judi Dench, in the dark, intimate space of The Other Place), Othello (1989, with McKellen as Iago and Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona), and King Lear (2007, in the Stratford Complete Works Festival, on world tour, and then in London). Here he reflects upon his production of Troilus and Cressida for the National Theatre in London in 1999.

  Did you and your designer go for an evocation of the Trojan War or of some other particular war—or the suggestion that this could be any war?

  MB: We wanted to suggest a war where cynical expediency and realpolitik could credibly clash with dynastic family loyalty and heroism. Our world suggested both the Spanish Civil War and the conflict between the Irish and the British in the early twentieth century.

  TN: Troilus and Cressida is categorized by scholarly opinion as a “problem play” along with Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. Practitioners in the theater can be forgiven for asking, “What’s the problem?” Troilus and Cressida is thrillingly complex in both structure and language, but we know from many contemporary productions that it can work devastatingly in the theater, and that the intricacies and convolutions of its verse need not lessen its emotional and philosophical impact.

  I have long believed—but I cannot prove it—that at the time of writing Troilus, Shakespeare and his actors had started to perform at the smaller indoor theater in Blackfriars, as well as maintaining their repertoire at The Globe. Performing to a smaller, more focused audience, in a space lit by candlepower, and with the acoustics of a roofed enclosed room, would have encouraged Shakespeare to experiment with ever more naturalistic effects in his verse, and indeed to raise the bar of complex thought in his writing, liberated by a new sense of intimacy and the luxury of total audibility.

  When I was a student I saw a superbly successful production of Troilus and Cressida, directed by Peter Hall, with Dorothy Tutin as an extraordinarily voluptuous Cressida, surrounded by a wonderfully diverse company, including Peter O’Toole as Thersites, Max Adrian as Pandarus, and Eric Porter as Ulysses. The action of the play took place in a sand pit. Partly as “homage” to this brilliant evocation of the play, and partly to try to develop the idea a stage further, I created a production at the National Theatre in 1999, designed by Rob Howell, which featured a much bigger sand pit, of reddish-orange sand, that appeared almost miraculously to be able to change color between one scene and another. With the addition of tent-like shapes, we were able to move with cinematic continuous flow between Troy and the Greek camp.

  There is, in my view, no value whatsoever in updating Troilus and Cressida to a later century, with implications of the horrors of more modern mechanical warfare. Many plays of Shakespeare benefit immensely from being seen through the prism of a modern setting, but Troilus is not one of them. The play relies on concepts of honor, nobility, and the existence of mythic heroic figures, one of them the son of a goddess, that have no real equivalents in the modern world, and its plot moves toward confrontations of single combat; indeed highly symbolic single combat, to the point when—by foul means—Achilles destroys Hector and the war itself seems thereby to have been decided.

  And the movement between city and camp, domestic settings and battlefield: how did you convey that visually?

  MB: For our small-scale touring production, Tom Piper designed a burned-out, war-torn chapel-cum-kitchen which could move from Priam’s family dinner-table to the battlefield with ease. A red velvet curtain could be drawn across to suggest a tent or a press conference backdrop, and to conceal the damage wrought by the Greek “iconoclasts.”

  TN: The play is Shakespeare’s inquiry into “Wars and lechery,” which of course gives him his cue equally to examine peace and love, the ideal possibilities of human contact as opposed to the worse bestial instincts that so readily dominate our behavior. The war in question has been caused by the elopement of Helen with Paris; or, in other words, either an example of pure love, or an example of unbridled lust and selfish recklessness. Is the resulting Greek invasion high-minded and principled or a bloodthirsty adventure in pursuit of spoils and bloody revenge? For Shakespeare, the two very different cultures, Greek and Trojan, don’t divide at a moral fault line, with all the honor and principle on one side and all the compromise and pragmatism on the other. In both camps there are those who uphold the highest principles and those who cynically see how the world actually is, most particularly the world-weary Pandarus and the obsessed satirist Thersites.

  At the level of both design and interpretation, did you seek a sharp distinction between Greeks and Trojans? It’s sometimes said that the Trojans embody an older code of honor and chivalry, the Greeks a more “modern,” political, even Machiavellian stance, but it’s not quite that simple, is it?

  MB: Both Greeks and Trojans were revealed as venal, self-seeking, and flawed, but there was something peculiarly chilling about Colin Hurley’s utterly plausible Ulysses, and we felt an instinctive warmth toward the Trojans who were at least a family, albeit dysfunctional. The Greeks were wealthier, better dressed, and more urbane.

  TN: I wanted to make the maximum distinction between Greek and Trojans and so, choosing my casting from a large semipermanent multiracial ensemble, I had all of the Trojan parts played by artists of color, making the Trojan world an African civilization, in strong contrast to the Greek invaders who were all Caucasian, and as if from another hemisphere.

  The Trojan world in my production was heavy with hieratic ritual; the Greek world, less obviously religiously coherent and more individually anarchic, giving rise to Ulysses’ plea for order, as he reminds his colleagues:

  Take but degree away, untune that string

  And, hark, what discord follows …

  Unquestionably, the impression was given in this production that the Trojan culture was the more ancient and mystical, and that the Greeks were a more recent power with colonial ambitions, but with high intellectual and moral standards:

  For beauty, wit,

  High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,

  Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all

  To envious and calumniating time.

  Ulysses is as educated and sensitive a spokesman as any to be found in the Shakespeare canon but, unquestionably, he is a rationalist.

  There are several scenes of watching and overhearing (the return of the Trojan soldiers near the beginning, Troilus in the Greek camp near the end): how did you handle these?

  MB: One convention that we enjoyed, especially when emotions ran high, was to make the overhearer “invisible” to those overheard, and let him be unrealistically close enough to smell them and stab them. It helped to dramatize and externalize the violent impulse, pent up in the verse.

  TN: The pivotal scene for me, with respect to these two cultures (placed pivotally in the play by Shakespeare), was the “tent scene,” Hector and his fellow Trojans being welcomed—Troilus included—by the Greek generals into their camp: as potent as the famous Christmas Day impromptu football match between a group of German and British soldiers, an exchange of friendship and admiration amongst men who know that tomorrow they are committed to killing each other: “Tomorrow do I meet thee, fell as death: / Tonight all friends.”

  In my production, these two very distinct cultures, unfamiliar with each other’s ways, finally found themselves dancing and even embracing together, a brief peace process seeming to render the continuation of the war unnecessary.

  In a coup de théâtre of genius, Shakespeare uses that same brief truce to allow Troilus to roam around the Greek camp in search of Cressida, only to witness the love of his life giving in to the seduction of Diomedes, a scene of almost unbearable pain and cruelty. The device of overhearing a crucial conversation is one that Shakespeare has used a number of times before, in plays such as Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing, and will go on to use to equally devastating effect in Othello and in the sleepwalking scene in Macbeth. But no overhearing scene is quite so distressing as this, when the young and idealistic Troilus is witness to everything that gives meaning to his life crumble and turn to ash. We in the audience experience the pain of this overhearing with him.

  Troilus has to believe in his own romantic passion for Cressida, but do the audience?

  MB: We are not asked to “believe in” Troilus’ passion in the same way we are perhaps invited to with Romeo, but to feel no sympathy with Troilus’ love for Cressida and sit in cool judgment on his passion, is to sit with Ulysses’ reductive smugness, and be content with an evening that proves you right. It also makes the fatal mistake of reading the end of the play and Cressida’s betrayal into Act 1.

  6. William Houston as Troilus and Jayne Ashbourne as Cressida in Michael Boyd’s 1998 RSC production.

  Cressida is bartered by the Trojans and bullied by the Greeks: how did you avoid making her into, above all else, a victim?

  MB: Shakespeare avoids that sentimentalism by making Cressida a survivor, who is aware of her own erotic authority and sexual needs, as well as her capacity for love.

  TN: It was essential in my production that it should not be in any sense in Cressida’s character or nature to be disloyal or superficial or opportunistic:

  Prince Troilus, I have loved you night and day

  For many weary months.

  She is so clearly enraptured by the idea of becoming the wife of Troilus; she is so clearly a victim of war, as she is forcibly uprooted from Troy to become a humiliated fantasy plaything for an array of sex-starved Greek generals, and isolated and desperate as she is, her actions are all too understandable in giving in to her would-be protector, Diomedes. Her great declaration of fidelity, climaxing in “As false as Cressid,” had to be, for us, a huge unconscious irony. Shakespeare seems to be proclaiming her human limitations, she is flawed; but the great humanist is reminding us that we all are … it happens.

  The play at this exact point abandons the ideal of noble or honorable behavior (apart from Hector allowing Achilles to escape), and the bestial nature of human beings in conflict becomes the dominant theme. Hector is greedily distracted in pursuit of a magnificent armor; Achilles slaughters the unarmed hero with the aid of a pack of Myrmidons, and not in the long-heralded test of single combat; Hector’s body is dragged disgustingly around the walls of Troy; Troilus becomes a killing machine. Thersites’ vision of a bestial world is fulfilled, and a pox-ridden Pandarus bequeaths venereal disease to his audience, to succeeding generations, and unmistakably to Shakespeare’s London, as he taunts “the brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade.”

  How do you see the roles of the other women in the play?

  MB: We noticed that Troy was a much more feminine world. We found that only Cressida’s voice had strength enough to survive the relentless logic of war and manipulative power politics, and that even her hideously compromised voice was more vivid than that of Helen. The clearest marker of Shakespeare’s pessimism is how little space he can bring himself to give to Cassandra.

  How did you and your actors approach the roles of Pandarus in the love plot and Thersites in the war plot?