Troilus And Cressida

Matthew Dunster’s heated, bawdy, impassioned, rowdy production depicts the Greeks and the Trojans as impetuous schoolboys squabbling over fickle women.

The Globe’s stage, as ever, is bare but for a curtained tent in the centre and a walkway that leads down into the pit, where the armoured soldiers occasionally stride through the groundlings on their way to and from the stage.

The war that began with Paris’s snatching of Helen from Menelaus has already lasted seven years and the Greeks remain camped outside the walls of Troy, while inside the Trojans are as distracted by love as by war. While Paris cavorts with Helen, Pandarus (Matthew Kelly) brokers a love match between his niece, Cressida, and Paris’s brother Troilus. But the couple are swiftly separated as Cressida, whose father has defected, is ordered to join her father in the Greek camp in exchange for the Trojan prisoner of war Antenor.

But this is not a romantic play; Dunster brings out the humour and the bawdiness within Shakespeare’s text to create strong characters who are not always the most sympathetic. Troilus is a young, fresh-faced, impetuous soldier whose love for Cressida turns whiny when she is taken from him. Though the wily, gamine Cressida has admirable strength of mind and knows how to get what she wants, she turns out to be no less fickle than Helen, whose relationship with Paris is depicted as randy and self-indulgent rather than romantic.

The soldiers, too, are strongly characterised, not least the petulant Achilles (Trystan Gravelle), who, even before we see him, is depicted as a drama queen. Dressed in long white robes, with a Welsh accent and some Robert Smith-style heavy eye make-up, he hardly seems the great warrior of his reputation. Dunster emphasises this interpretation when Achilles faces the Greeks, who mock him rather than revere him. His characterisation is complete when he kills the Trojan Hector in a distinctly cowardly manner.

As much a lesson on Greek mythology as entertainment, the real focus of Troilus And Cressida is the relationships between the two warring camps, rather than the love story within it, which serves as a device to keep the plot moving forward. The fool Thersites (Paul Hunter), the strong-but-dim Ajax (Chinna Wodu) and Kelly’s meddlesome, people-pleasing Pandarus keep humour at the forefront of the action.

With some well-staged fight scenes (by fight director Kevin McCurdy), Anna Fleishle’s gritty costumes and a flourish of drumming at the end, Dunster’s production brings a sense of the epic to Shakespeare’s Globe.

CB