OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

Theater Review: Echoes of Belfast in LWT Shakespeare staging

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Joseph Hurley

"TROILUS AND CRESSIDA," Royal Shakespeare Company International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven.

The text, as always, refers to Trojans and Greeks, but a large plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, surrounded by flickering votive candles and backed by a shattered rose window stands in a niche of the setting of Belfast-born director Michael Boyd’s powerful new staging of Shakespeare’s infrequently produced "Troilus and Cressida."

The accent here, in every sense of the word, is Irish, and Boyd, addressing a group of scholars and participants in New Haven for the Fourth International Festival of Arts and Ideas, to which Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company had sent the play, admitted that he was unable to get Northern Ireland out of his mind as he worked on the play.

The idea of civil conflict among people who aren’t tremendously different from one another seemed to him to be more compelling than a struggle between two groups of people involved in what might be termed a conventional war, one side against the other.

The audience hears the familiar names, Hector and Troilus and Paris among the Trojans, and Ulysses and Agamemnon and Achilles representing the Greeks, and sees a large company of mainly excellent actors wearing mix-and-match military garb of the sort familiar from news reporting originating in Latin America and, particularly, Southeastern Europe.

Never miss an issue of The Irish Echo

Subscribe to one of our great value packages.

Despite these visual and aural prods, the mind returns unswervingly to Belfast, perhaps more so now that the Northern Ireland peace agreement appears to be once again threatened by a potentially deadly impasse.

It would be difficult just now to watch the play’s scenes of political argument, and its more or less alternating parlays and power brokering, first among the Greeks and then the Trojans, without thinking of Bertie Ahern, Tony Blair, David Trimble, Gerry Adams, and the others, and in a way, even seeing them in a sort of transparent overlay as Menelaus, Diomedes, Ajax, Patroclus, Helenus and their colleagues air their points of view, often with their heels firmly and resolutely dug into the soil of their respective territories.

Director Boyd’s "Troilus," which alternated during the Festival on the Long Wharf Mainstage with David Attenborough’s fresh and fast-moving mounting of Brian Friel’s adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s "A Month in the Country," is that rare Shakespearean item, a production that begins slowly, even deliberately, and then, gathering steam and speed with virtually every succeeding scene, roars straight ahead, nonstop, to a devastating climax, leaving its audience, most members of which have probably never encountered the play before, virtually breathless.

The Arts and Ideas Festival director, Paul Collard, describes "Troilus and Cressida" as "Shakespeare’s most unconsolingly nihilistic play," and a convincing argument could easily be made to bolster his point of view. Since it was written, either in 1601 or 1602, the play has eluded facile categorization. First published in 1609 in a version calling it a "tragedy," it has, in various subsequent editions, it has been termed a "history" and even a "comedy." Elsewhere, it has been described as a "comical satire," and even a "tragical satire."

One thing it is most definitely not is a romantic tragedy in the manner of "Romeo and Juliet." Both Troilus and his errant love, Cressida, are alive at the final curtain, Troilus, a decidedly jaded lover, follows his slain brother, Hector, as the Trojan leader, vowing to revenge the murder committed by Achilles.

The company assembled by director Boyd places Irish actors from the North and from the Republic in at least half a dozen major roles, and, without exception, they perform brilliantly and contribute powerfully to underlining the anguish associated with the long-running, essentially unprofitable internal conflict to be found in various unhappy corners of the world at the moment, nowhere more agonizingly than in Northern Ireland.

Among the Irish members of the RSC cast, a definite standout is Lloyd Hutchinson, whose Thersites is played here as a creepily opportunistic photo journalist, making his self-interested, cynical way through a tortured and bleeding war zone.

Equally riveting are the impetuous, strong-willed Troilus provided by William Houston, Catherine Walker’s grieving Cassandra, the stalwart Rory Murray as the Trojan commander, ‘neas, and Stephen Armstrong as Helenus, like the titular hero, a son of King Priam.

Roy Hanlon, veteran of both Dublin’s Abbey and Belfast’s Lyric, is a memorable Pandarus, uncle to Cressida and the agent in the matter of arranging her single tryst with Troilus.

Helen, the beauty whose abduction by Priam’s youngest son, Paris, triggered the Trojan War, running for some seven years by the time the play begins, is embodied by the lithe and elegant Sara Stewart, whose cagey Natalya Petrovna was the linchpin of Friel’s Turgenev adaptation. Here she’s an edgy siren in dark glasses and a camel’s hair coat.

Tom Piper’s stage design, mainly a battered back wall with a rough, heavy wooden door, suitable for slamming, built into it, serves the production admirably, as does Chris Davey’s lighting, reconfigured for the tour, which ended in New Haven, by Oliver Fenwick.

The music composed and arranged by John Woolf, comprising everything, it would seem, from the throat singers of the Caucasus to what sounds suspiciously like Hawaiian ukulele music, adds immeasurably to the production’s ultimate impact, particularly in the final lap or so of the overall three and a quarter hours.

The Royal Shakespeare Company, long rumored to be in decline, would appear to have taken a new lease on theatrical life, if the two productions visiting New Haven are any indication. It’s a considerable pity that New York wasn’t on the schedule.

Other Articles You Might Like

Sign up to our Daily Newsletter

Click to access the login or register cheese