"Troilus and Cressida". Burton Taylor Studio. Review by Victoria Tayler

 

You can tell when a play is made with love. You can also tell when it is made with a healthy heaping of disdain.  

Troilus and Cressida is somewhere in the middle: absurd, charming, incomprehensible, hilarious. Moribayassa Productions described the show as an 'anti-garden play.' I get the gripe. Oxford is literally crawling with summer Shakespeare chock full of melodrama and cliches, sometimes wonderful, sometimes all too familiar. Disdain for the stagnation of the genre gives this play its creative impetus and its charm. The creative liberties are extensive and the rewards are potentially great. The risks, well, they’re negligible.  

It’s hard to say exactly what that charm is, only that I liked it. The play opens with Troilus (balaclava-clad) staring into the static on an old school, 32-inch TV, whilst Pandarus stares at the audience invasively from the corner, and Cressida waltzes around jaggedly. It’s pretty gripping. They follow up on that large aesthetic promise with a number of other joyous images. Pandarus is vaping through the entire play, and gives us a karaoke performance of ‘Tunnel of Love’ to celebrate the (un)happy union of Cressida and Troilus. All on the silver Sony TV, of course. Everything is cast in art-house, red and green lighting.

The TV is a real moment of creative genius. It totally transforms the scenes and rescues them from tired tropes. As Pandarus tries to convince Cressida to take Troilus for a husband, we get an almost MTV style breakdown of all her possible matches in the form of doggedly filmed, mug-shot style clips of Antenor, Aeneas, Hector and Paris. Their helmets are replaced with grey, knit balaclavas with holes in them. It’s kind of perfect, offering the audience a memorable look at the wide cast at the get-go. The TV is also used in depictions of Thersites, a rather abusive, forthright fool by Shakespeare standards (think: Falstaff), here shown entirely through the medium of home-video style recordings. He’s like the intoxicated guy on the 2am tube, inhumanly energetic, too distracted to be frightening, physically incapable of harm, but weird in the extreme. His riffs about bastardry really could not come off any better. It’s dark and he’s on a play-park roundabout, and as he zooms forward he delivers a line (eye contact all over the place, a fitting detail) before zooming back and around again. It’s disconcerting and hilarious, and feels strangely true to Shakespeare’s intended character, albeit translated into modern terms.

Sometimes, the production avoids garden-play stereotypes more in aesthetic than performance. Troilus and Cressida, sporting rather earnest depictions of the roles, wouldn't be that out of place in a classic garden play. They’re constrained by their tragic arcs, of course, but their sincerity chafes against the play’s unserious aesthetic. There are a few forgotten lines, and the deliveries sometimes make it hard to understand the plot. Ulysses’ monologues are hard to hear and wind up being impossible to follow. Not to mention that the play was heavily disadvantaged by their original Pandarus dropping out a few weeks before the run. Despite the difficulties, Pandarus does well. They’re reading the lines on an Ipad, but this is kind of disguised by their disinterested, vaping persona, which almost renders it part of the character. It’s only when we get to the final scene, which is off-Ipad, and extremely gripping, that we realise what we could have had all along.  

Other characters break with garden-play tradition in rather nebulous and left-field ways, but they work. Benjamin Remler plays Diomedes with a 'Russian' (he corrects me: Romanian Jewish) accent, employing an immediately recognisable, if Hollywood-ified, trope. In doing so, he removes the barriers of entry which come with a less known Shakespeare, and lead. 

the audience into the major conflict of the play. Remler also plays Paris’ servant (nameless, as far as I am aware) as a yes-ma'am-no-ma'am head scratching Southern American, again, giving the audience something to cling on to and laugh about. It plays surprisingly well, particularly in juxtaposition with Pandarus, face painted white, teeth blackened, carrying his Ipad and vaping idly: “Friend, we understand not one another. I am too courtly and thou art too cunning.” The strength of the production certainly lies in its’ more humorous moments.  

Helena and Paris also break the mold of garden-play Shakespeare as a moody starlet, sprawling dilettante combo. Their characters are inventive, self-aware, meta and pure fun.  

The overall aesthetic of the characters is pretty incohesive, and that doesn’t feel intentional, but I imagine it were left intentionally uncorrected. Perhaps dialling in the performances would have culled the joy. It may have been messy, but no one can say it wasn’t fun.

If I had to sum up this production, the highs are high, and the lows are low. Criticising the production feels unfair because it is so clearly unconcerned with being serious. It’s less about symbolism, more about absurdism, and in that way, who can criticise its’ choices? But I wish every actor had leaned into that a little more. The seriousness of Troilus and Cressida versus the blatant unseriousness of basically everything else feels a little out of place. Then again, the script doesn’t exactly allow for a comic reading. Maybe this is one of the problems with constructing an anti-trope Shakespeare, one has to run against the tide. With less stumbling blocks and more time, maybe it would have come off better. Ah well, the essence is there, and I sure had fun.