Word: troilus
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Ashton, who also directs the play, has taken the overworked Troilus and Cressida theme, retained the Trojan setting, and come up with two acts that purport to depict the horrors of war. By war, Ashton means War, and he has underscored the universality of his theme by a sometimes clever juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern...
Whereas in 1948 a polished production of Troilus and Cressyda could be seen for $.90, two years ago the cheapest seat in the house for that remarkable production of Macbeth was $1.20. And while in 1952 one could have seen a professional production of Billy Budd, by the Brattle Players, for $.80 and a full length production of Shaw's Candida for $.60, one now is forced to pay $1.50 to scramble for a chair in the Adams House lower common room to see students playing Uncle Vanya. Just five years ago the Harvard Theater Group presented Coriolanus with admission...
...more to enforce the prevailing decadence, Shakespeare provides a simple and trusting Troilus (who is soon betrayed), a manly and serious Hector (who is ultimately butchered). And he offers in Ulysses a median figure, a brilliant yet unavailing man of the world. Such characters help deepen the play's mood, interrupt slithering words with resonant poetry, reveal not just the lashes of scorn but the salt tears of feeling. In its unevenness, Troilus does touch depths; in its waywardness, it does sometimes strike home...
...staging this Old Vic's Troilus, Tyrone Guthrie has swept the décor and atmosphere of the play some 30 centuries forward. He has boldly evoked an Edwardian world full of prance and panoply, his Trojans very British, his Greeks very German. He has shown a siren Helen lolling against a cream-and-gold piano; he makes Pandarus frock-coated and effeminate, Thersites a disheveled cockney war photographer. He might find license for his anachronisms in the play itself, where Hector quotes Aristotle...
...better than Shakespeare did. Some of Guthrie's inventions, rather than useful tools, are merely pretty toys; in general, he is too gaily farcical for Shakespeare's guilty merriment; and often, by smothering the words, he refuses to let Shakespeare speak for himself. Yet, though brightened, his Troilus is not bowdlerized: at the big moments Achilles is gangster enough, and Cressida (well played by lovely Rosemary Harris) enough of a bawd. Guthrie's Troilus is like a very free but very robust translation-a fair exchange if not an exact equivalent...