School of Pythagoras, St John's College
Tuesday 18 – Saturday 22 November
Dir. Greg Buchanan

Three Stars

Troilus and Cressida is a deeply ambiguous and almost impenetrable play. Set in a stifling war zone, it is neither tragedy nor comedy nor love story – there is no grand catharsis, just people being inevitably warped and worn down by their own messy weaknesses, an unflinchingly bleak and realistic vision of war and love, where the morally adaptable rather than the good thrive.

The main problem of Greg Buchanan’s production was the poor quality of the movement. There was very little sense we were in a self destructive and destroying landscape of war. The result was that too much of the underlying tension, hysteria and disturbance of the text and plot was ironed out, most notably in Ulysses’ key argument. Aside from a well choreographed fight scene, most of the actors spent their long speeches tramping distractingly from one end of the creaking stage to the other, apparently wholly without purpose. Nevertheless, Sarah McNee's design is very striking, pitting the shiny black masks of the Greeks against the sober suits of the Trojans, and showing the noble Hector fastidiously folding his jacket to fight the snarling Ajax.

One of the main difficulties of the text is the long, confusing speeches with very little to sympathise with or be uplifted by. This is a play rarely attempted in performance, and the director of any production has to tease out a clear and interesting way through the material, to unearth the emotional arcs, subtle changes of allegiance and erosion of ideals. Okey Nzelu and Eleanor Massie in the title roles were clear and arresting as the couple whose love trips up and fails, although I wasn’t convinced by Cressida’s betrayal: it was un-detailed and seemed more schizophrenic than slowly corrosive. Hannah Love was deftly confident and wonderfully funny as the morally disease-riddled Pandarus, and coped especially well in light of the odd decision to make the character gender-less.

This production is certainly worth seeing; it’s in some ways very impressive and that it is entirely self funded is certainly a sign of Buchanan’s commitment and ambition. In the two and a half hours it lasted, however, I didn’t feel that he had made enough sense of the complicated material. The end of Troilus and Cressida should leave the audience and cast in a ravaged landscape riddled with searing failure. There were some excellent moments here, but at too many points it flagged and sagged into unintelligibility.

Isabel Taylor

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