Troilus and Cressida
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Richard Monette's production of Troilus and Cressida has two shining virtues. One is the intelligence that informs the speaking and staging of each individual scene; whether wittily, passionately or despairingly, the characters relate. The other achievement is really the former writ large; all these episodes are forged into a pattern.

Like most directors, Monette places his intermission at the point where Troilus, the youngest prince of Troy, wins the love -- and the body -- of Cressida, whose father has defected to the Greeks and who is liable at any moment to be sent to be join him. As we watch these precarious sweethearts embrace, courtesy of Cressida's uncle Pandarus the super-bawd, two other couples are spotlit at opposite corners of the stage, reminding us what, in this play's society, love actually means. There are Paris and Helen, whose legendary passion caused the legendary war that is now in its seventh weary year. And, representing the Greek camp, there is the spoiled hero Achilles and Patroclus, his companion -- or, as he's described by the scabrous Thersites in the only explicit homosexual reference in any Shakespeare play (and I'm not forgetting Richard II), his "masculine whore." There is a matching tableau at the end of the play when all pretenses of love and honour are in tatters: Troilus, Cressida, Pandarus, Thersites, each in desperate isolation. I am not suggesting these unifying devices are earth-shakingly original, or that this is the most imaginative production Monette or anyone else has ever directed at Stratford. It may, though, be one of the most lucid, and with Troilus that could be more important.

A very great play, it can also seem a very diffuse one. Its themes are tightly knotted, and the Trojan War itself bestows some appearance of unity. But in fact Shakespeare drew on two sources and two groups of characters. Half of the play is taken, however sardonically, from Homer; the famous "anger of Achilles," the war-hero who refuses to quit his tent and fight the Trojans until Patroclus' death stirs him to fury, is reduced to a highly ambiguous fit of the sulks, and he kills Hector, his chivalrous Trojan opposite, not in single combat but in a vicious ambush. Troilus and Cressida, though, seem to have been inventions of the Middle Ages, and it can sometimes seem a mere coincidence they are occupying the same space. Even at the end, in the chaos of battle, the various actions do not so much unite as -- to use the kind of abrasive image the play itself delights in -- rub up against one another.

I had to miss this production's first night and, having heard some disparaging reports, I found myself wondering when the bad stuff was going to start. It never does. Even the notorious superimposition of Nine Inch Nails' “Closer to God” at the end of the play failed to bother me. I don't think it helps much, but it lasts for all of 30 seconds, and is pretty much inaudible anyway. It does, though, enable the management to post a sign in the lobby warning of "offensive language," which must be a first for Stratford Shakespeare. Actually, all of Shakespeare's plays, by censorship standards, contain offensive language, and none more than this one, but the general assumption is the pure of heart won't notice.

"Wars and lechery ... nothing else holds fashion" is Thersites' uncontroversial summary of the action. This production clearly enjoys getting its hands dirty in both areas. But it also bears down on the words and ideas that insistently cross the narrative lines: Value (who, or what, is worth fighting for?), Taste (sex is for epicures), Time (the great leveller, the great destroyer and -- mercifully -- the great anaesthetist). By the end, we have a clear notion of what the play is about. David Snelgrove is an excellent Troilus, at once sincere and self- indulgent. He has the guts, when convinced of the banished Cressida's infidelity, to play self-pity and hysteria for what they are; and he manages the transition to pitiless warrior admirably. Claire Jullien shows comparable nerve by taking Cressida seriously; beset by insecurities, she still means her vows. She begins to crack when Troilus, at their parting, keeps harping on his constancy and her possible falsehood. She senses, suddenly, that it's all about him. Her reception at the Greek camp ("kissed in general") is played as a virtual gang-rape, leaving her no recourse but her own wits; her final yielding is given a graphically sexual staging that, for once, makes sense.

I can't say the same for the public rutting of those smoochers Paris and Helen, nor for Pandarus' feeling-up of a young male servant who ought to be running rings round him. Not that there isn't plenty of warrant elsewhere for Bernard Hopkins' playing Pandarus as a busy, voyeuristic old queen. He's putting Cressida in Troilus' bed as a substitute for being there himself. Note that when the lovers are parted all his sympathy, all his concern, are for the boy. There's kindness in his performance, too, and a progressively harrowing presentation, vocal and physical, of Pandarus' "diseases." He's as much emblem as character.

Stephen Ouimette's Thersites could probably be more emblematic; his individual scenes are salty enough but his presence doesn't infect the air. As Ulysses -- the self-appointed spokesman for order and logic in a world that rejects both -- Peter Donaldson is expectedly trenchant. He's the clever outsider, needed but disliked, and dispatched on the more distasteful errands. One of these is the confrontation of Jamie Robinson's sinister narcissist of an Achilles, a sun god on the skids, who keeps his Patroclus (David Shelley) in a subtly observed state of uncertainty, never knowing which way, sexually or otherwise, his hero is going to jump.

Also good are Jeffrey Renn's buffoonish Ajax and Ian Deakin's trim Nestor. Among the Trojans, Tim Campbell places the ageing golden boy who is Paris, and Geordie Johnson makes a splendid Hector, the nearest thing to a tragic figure. It's he who, having marshalled all the arguments against the war, abruptly changes face and gives it the green light -- for reasons of prestige. This inconsistency, which used to worry critics into convulsions, is the play's starkest image of the way the world actually goes, then and now. There are also some exceptionally sharp cameos: Paul Soles' Priam, Paul Dunn's priestly Helenus (a character in four lines and a gesture), and Joanna Schellenberg's Cassandra, a still and scary irruption in what is already an impressively balanced council scene. (This year at Stratford, Cassandras -- this one, and Sara Topham's more spectacular turn in Agammenon -- have been good news.)

Some excessively nervous cutting deprives us of some of Ulysses' best lines and of Ajax's gruff epitaph for Hector. But the play that remains makes sense.