Troilus in the Cut

Troilus and Cressida
The National Theatre
The Observer

The National Theatre, playing at the Young Vic pending the completion of their own studio auditorium, have set Troilus and Cressida in what looks like half a bull-ring. Presently the actors enter; their costumes have traces of the classical drag usually adopt for this play but basically they are Elizabethan. Presumably, then, the arena really is a cock-pit; the author being Shakespeare and the subject war, it seems very plausible. The Greek warriors, Achilles and Ajax especially, are indeed so many fighting-cocks, and they spend much of the play crowing and preening themselves. In the battle-scenes at the end they are turned loose while Philip Stone’s Thersites, a malcontent battleman, sits on the enclosure-rail, cheering (and jeering) them on.

If the set takes some time to come into its own, the costumes help almost from the start. The Greek hierarchs- headed by Roland Culver, a wrinkled Agamemnon with a soul just visible beneath his pomposity - are encased, hemmed in by ruffs (Nestor’s appears to be mildewing). Ajax begins the play in silks and a string vest. Gulled into believing himself a champion, he joins the sartorial club. He even sports a laurel-wreath. He has a moustachioed air that is Caroline rather than Elizabethan; Gawn Grainger, who captures all the characters’s vanity, surliness and unexpected good nature, looks very much like Porthos, the nicest and thickest of the the three musketeers. Real viciousness is the prerogative of Achilles, a golden-robed prizefighter as played by Mark McManus, but a bantamweight rather than the expected heavy: a curious piece of satirical casting with which nothing else in the production- even the subtly disorientating costumes- really agrees.

The plainest-dressed of all is Philip Locke’s Ulysses, a free intellect who stands impatiently to the side while his colleagues windily dispute, then passionately calls them to order; or rather, his philosophy being what it is, to Order. The passion denotes as much respect for his own intellect- for intellect itself- as for his own immediate strategy. I have never seen this character’s status in the Greek camp - tolerated, needed, but not really liked, ignored on social occasions and more genuinely at home with his adversaries the Trojans- more fully realised.

The director, Elijah Moshinsky, has been nearly as successful with the Trojan councils as the Greek. Denis Quilley’s Hector, mature and sensible with fatal aberrations, embodies the chivalry whose death the play commemorates. Glyn Grain’s Paris, dashingly mean, is at least a temporary survivor; and Polly Adams makes a touchingly brittle Helen, another chivalric emblem in decay.

Between them stands Simon Ward’s Troilus, lucidly pleading the cause of a tarnished honour. There are areas, though, where lucidity is not enough and Mr Ward cannot make us feel the dangerous erotic power of Troilus’s false simplicity. So the love scenes suffer; as they also do from Robert Eddison’s Pandarus, accomplished but with hardly a trace of corruption, Chaucer’s Pandar rather than Shakespeare’s, and from Diana Quick’s Cressida, who departs from the recent tradition by not seeming a tart from the start, but fails to show us where the change comes. So the production’s success is partial, but it is usually engrossing, sometimes exhilarating, and with even the smallest parts vividly played, is palpable proof that, for the first time since Peter Hall’s accession, the National has a company.