Old Play in Manhattan

Troilus and Cressida (by William Shakespeare) has only once--and then as a Players Club frolic--been done on Broadway within living memory. Its neglect is easily explained: Troilus is a difficult as well as an imperfect play. Yet its neglect is scarcely warranted, for there is much that is special, fascinating, even fine about it, and much in its mood for a modern audience to respond to. With bitter and debunking cynicism, Shakespeare slashed in Troilus at the great fabric of the Trojan War, to rend its romance and heroism to tatters, to reduce its Homeric clang to verbosity and decadence.

Half of Shakespeare's characters are less creations than caricatures: a fatuous Ajax, a vicious Achilles, a sniveling Thersites, a driveling Nestor. Shakespeare's narrative recounts the harlotry of love and the homosexuality of friendship, shows war grotesquely fumbled and honor traduced. In the violence of its mood and the slackness of its method, in its surface disillusionment and its underlying disgust, in its fierce, fanged bite--yet its biting off more than it can chew--Troilus and Cressida resembles a little those harsh Huxleyan "sophisticated novels" of the '20s.

All the more to enforce the prevailing decadence, Shakespeare provides a simple and trusting Troilus (who is soon betrayed), a manly and serious Hector (who is ultimately butchered). And he offers in Ulysses a median figure, a brilliant yet unavailing man of the world. Such characters help deepen the play's mood, interrupt slithering words with resonant poetry, reveal not just the lashes of scorn but the salt tears of feeling. In its unevenness, Troilus does touch depths; in its waywardness, it does sometimes strike home.

In staging this Old Vic's Troilus, Tyrone Guthrie has swept the decor and atmosphere of the play some 30 centuries forward. He has boldly evoked an Edwardian world full of prance and panoply, his Trojans very British, his Greeks very German. He has shown a siren Helen lolling against a cream-and-gold piano; he makes Pandarus frock-coated and effeminate, Thersites a disheveled cockney war photographer. He might find license for his anachronisms in the play itself, where Hector quotes Aristotle.

But beyond that, however much Guthrie's treatment discolors Shakespeare's play, it unifies it better than Shakespeare did. Some of Guthrie's inventions, rather than useful tools, are merely pretty toys; in general, he is too gaily farcical for Shakespeare's guilty merriment; and often, by smothering the words, he refuses to let Shakespeare speak for himself. Yet, though brightened, his Troilus is not bowdlerized: at the big moments Achilles is gangster enough, and Cressida (well played by lovely Rosemary Harris) enough of a bawd. Guthrie's Troilus is like a very free but very robust translation--a fair exchange if not an exact equivalent.

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