Word: troilus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL, Lakewood Civic Auditorium, Lakewood, Ohio. Here a more traditional As You Like It features Maria Lennard, formerly of the Bristol Old Vic company, as Rosalind (July 9-15); Macbeth and his extremely active wife are played by Britishers Stephen Scott and Maureen Harley (July 17-27); and Troilus and Cressida stars Scott as Hector (Aug. 14-Sept. 11). A Shavian touch is added by Candida with Celeste Holm and Wesley Addy (July...
Which is all fine and good, except Shakespeare wrote a supreme anti-climax. In the text (cut from this production) Troilus and his romantic replacement Diomedes fight one another across the stage three times, Shakespeare resorting to familiar mechanics prior to an important killing as he does in Macbeth and several of the history plays. But the killing never comes, they fight their way offstage, we never see them again, our expectations are brutally cheated. Instead, Hector (decidedly the wrong man at this point) gets killed with his pants down by Achilles, and the play ends with nothing resolved...
...specifics: Troilus and Cressida are not, as this production would them, interchangeable with Romeo and Juliet. Although Troilus' first scenes are thoughtfully conceived and work fine with Troilus mooning-about indulging in the awkward speculation of a seventeen-year-old virgin, a later device of having the lovers visibly improvising the romantic metaphors they lovingly hurl at one another is gratuitous. First, it's a stock actor's trick (whenever you have a self-conscious speech to say, you make it quite clear that you're writing it on the spot) and all those pauses, well...
...scenes lend to even-out the wildly different qualities tossed-about in the play (and Schmidt's notes concede this diffusion) in favor of repetitious and uninteresting mannerism. About the middle of the second act we begin to feel we've seen it all before in the first act. Troilus washing his face recalls the Trojan's first act entrance, actors who project physical characteristics early in the play keep projecting them and, as in the Loeb's Balcony, everyone is always clutching at one another to a degree dramatically unjustifiable even in a war story set among the Greeks...
Michael Mckean provided a wooden and unconvincing Troilus, at least on opening night, and his youthful monotone, obviously deliberate in many places, grew way out of proportion in scenes when some acting would have been appropriate. Lisa Kelley fared a little better as Cressida, probably because the script requires one hell of a character change whether the actress likes it or not, but she spent most of her time struggling with difficult verse and a very strange costume reminiscent of early Ku Klux Klan...