Shakespeare’s take on the Iliad is hard to categorise. Set during the doldrums of the Trojan war, seven years in, it speaks of conflict as well as of Troilus and Cressida’s star-crossed love. But is this a history play highlighting the hopelessness of war, or a send-up of Homer’s heroic masculinity with a romance thrown in?
No doubt Hamlet’s pontificating Polonius would have a hyphenated answer to the mixing of genres (is this what he meant by a “tragical-historical-pastoral?”). Director Owen Horsley has an answer too: this is satire – if not war-farce – in which the “heroes” of classical antiquity are roundly ridiculous. A giant, Pythonesque foot sits on the stage (great design by Ryan Dawson Laight), to set the tone.
Horsley’s direction brings clarity to a dense play – the cast-list is trimmed (there is no Priam, Aeneas or Andromache, among others) while long, sabre-rattling speeches are hemmed in or made buffoonish. The warring men flex their muscles, showboat in gold armour like Marvel superheroes, and bask in our applause on circular daises placed in the pit. It is clear, through the satire, that their war is driven by vanity and power. Several gender inversions (Ulysses, Thersites, Pandarus) are used effectively for the same end.
Achilles (David Cave) is a slob, refusing to fight in the war as his pretty-boy lover Patroclus (Tadeo Martinez) hangs by. Ajax (Ibraheem Toure) is a convincing meat-head, manipulated to encourage Achilles back to the battlefield. Ulysses (Jodie McNee) is a strategist pulling all their strings.
Much of it is amusing and inventive: Cassandra (also McNee) is dressed as an activist, and delivers her urgent predictions through a megaphone. Romantic fixer Pandarus (Samantha Spiro) is a bawd, dropping crass nudge-winks after Troilus (Kasper Hilton-Hille, ardent, earnest) and Cressida (Charlotte O’Leary, headstrong yet pragmatic) spend the night together. The shambolic fool, Thersites (Lucy McCormick), is inventively reincarnated as a prancing, twitching goth in gold shorts and bra.
It bursts with ideas and invention, perhaps too much so. There are so many ideas and comic inversions that they create complication that verges on chaos. And even at its trotting pace and with its streamlined script, it still feel too long, with a tone that strays into the wacky. The cast double up in what seems like significant pairings, but it is unclear why McCormick plays Thersites and Helen of Troy in the same twitching manner – is it a clownish send-up of the central love that sparks the Trojan war?
The dark turn in Troilus and Cressida’s love story is made graphic as Greek soldiers grope Cressida after she is traded to the Greeks by her own father. But it does not quite carry the chilling echoes it should, butting awkwardly against the comedy.
Yet Cressida is still a force in her depiction here: a survivor who understands war is about power, and is determined to come out of it alive. Her disappearance, after she is traded, gives this play its inherent unresolved and unsatisfying end. War simply rumbles on, as do these lustful men. Pandarus tries, heroically, to bring the last few laughs here. It is a heroic attempt at comedy all round.
At Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 26 October
