The big metal back-wall that wouldn’t budge on the first night of Peter Stein’s revival of Troilus and Cressida, causing the cancellation of the Trojan War halfway through the proceedings, defied the gremlins the next day. It shifted forward and opened to reveal Richard Clothier’s chivalric Hector refusing to heed the forebodings of his nearest and dearest. Then it tilted to create a platform on which skimpily clad men bashed away at each other while Hector was sneakily murdered by Vincent Regan’s arrogant, unscrupulous Achilles.
You could see why Stein had cancelled. After all, this was the climax of a production strong on visual effect and, it must be said, decent enough in other respects. You leave the King’s Theatre impressed by the eloquence of Shakespeare’s most cynical play. There’s no honour in battle. Thanks to Cressida’s betrayal of the loyal Troilus, there can be no faith in romantic love. “Still wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion,” snarls Ian Hughes’s scrawny, bitter Thersites — and he’s the play’s voice and disfigured soul.
At the start Henry Pettigrew emphasises what’s callow in lovelorn Troilus, flinging down his weapons like a bolshie teenager sprinkling CDs round his bedroom, and getting all awkward and nervous when at long last he encounters Annabel Scholey’s Cressida. He also hardens and despairs well enough. But shouldn’t he react more strongly when he hears that his beloved is to be part of a hostage swap? And should he be killed by Achilles’ heavies at the end, when Shakespeare wanted him unhappily, unheroically to survive? It’s hard for a British actress to embody Ulysses’ description of Cressida, which is that “her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body”, but Scholey does well, giving us a pert, provocative, effortlessly sensual girl who somehow contrives to be both innocent and knowing. Indeed, there’s plenty of sex in Stein’s production, most obviously when the sort of huge red bed that belongs in an 1890s brothel descends from the flies, complete with a frolicking Paris and Helen and, before long, Paul Jesson’s wonderfully lubricious Pandarus.
The revival mixes periods: warriors who might have stepped from Greek vases, yet leaders who vary from Ian Hogg’s stately Agamemnon in his sleek black leather overcoat to John Kane’s beaten, bedraggled Menelaus, who might be in search of a hostel for the night. There are several nice, Stein-style touches, such as John Franklyn-Robbins’s decrepit Nestor snoring when the great Agamemnon orates, but the piece sometimes feels slow — and needs to quicken and sharpen before the production moves to Stratford next month.
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