Troilus and Cressida

There are two basic ways to do pedestrian Shakespeare. One could be described as the old-fashioned heavy classical method the Old Vic employed splendidly in the 1950's; although no surprises reward the attentive eye of an audience, it's Shakespeare and it's all there. The second method is the flagrantly interpretive stylized re-think so many directors feel essential nowadays when taking-on the bard.

Belonging to that unhappy second category Paul Schmidt's production screws around a lot, and most of it is pretty second-rate. Shakespeare's vicious savage, often Websterian tragedy is, for God's sake, not the lightweight collection of ideas on this stage, and when the play does assume characteristics of the darkest and most destructive comedy (as the program notes fashionably term the entire play) in the last few scenes, Schmidt reverses the entire style of his own production to heavy and symbolic drama, groping I presume for an ending via sudden spurts of electronic music and taped dialogue replays. Hector is strung up before our very eyes, the lighting goes all blood red in back of him a rewrite of the text overemphasizes the ironies of love and war, and everything soars to a climax.

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 and the play ends with nothing resolved and the taste in your mouth resembling, in Harvard playwright Barry Forman's terms, the bottom of a birdcage.

But, to 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's mmm's, and ah's rarely add any sense of spontaneity (this is also true of Ulysses's first speech as delivered by Daniel Seltzer) and almost always ruins the verse.

In this production, the effort and matter-of-factness instilled in the love 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 and Trojans. And it's shame, because Schmidt blocks beautifully on the huge stage (several entrances and scene transitions are stunning) and it would have been nice to see him experiment with more sophisticated dramatic gesture.

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.

As Pandarus, Robert Buckland sacrificed any hint of the corruption or malevolence key to the text to the laughs he could milk by playing as a fawning eunuch. My own reaction to this kind of performance is unprintable but I do think it's an obvious and unrewarding way to alter more accepted interpretations of the character. And this is also true of James Keach's Achilles, a psychopathic narcissistic Hell's Angel type, quickly uninteresting once the gag wears off. A more original job of reinterpretation is Schmidt's casting of Raymond Singer as the venemous fool Thersites, a character at once completely repellent yet perhaps the only moral person in the play. Singer is young and attractive, and therein lies the original job of reinterpretation. But again after awhile, the novelty of Thersites as a Caliban-cum-Puck wears thin as we desire something more substantial.

In smaller parts, Ronald Hunter as Hector and Louis Plante as Ajax were excellent, attempting successfully to take characters whom audiences associate with moral and physical arche-types and make them something quite different. Arthur Friedman didn't look a day older than he did playing Aufidius in a recent Loeb Coriolanus and consequently didn't convince me he was senile old Nestor for a minute.

Dwarfing the actors as only the Loeb can do, making action seem remote and impersonal, Sebastian Melmoth's impressive but ugly set puts the Loeb one step closer to a kind of synthetheatre defeating the electricity theatre can generate between stage and audience. The set's colors are not so much terra cottas as flesh and, added to the admirable but arty lighting, the whole thing was weighted toward the ghastly.

When it was all over, this reviewer was left with the memory of reading the great play and imagining a magnificant trumpet fanfare heralding the fight between Hector and Ajax, a sound interpreted in this production by a sickly goathorn whining offstage. Every time it sounded one expected a character from a P.G. Wodehouse musical to emerge saying "Your car is ready, Lord Wooster," or something. But that brings up a whole category of fun things you can do with Shakespeare, and we'd better let well enough alone.