Having heard on the grapevine (and even receiving word from the producer himself) about Troilus and Cressida falling victim to a last-minute casting upheaval, I decided that I needed to go into this play at the Burton Taylor with an open mind. This turned out to be a fortunate attitude to have armed myself with. Moribayassa Productions promised ‘an anti-garden play’ that would be a ‘violently shortened and mutilated’ version. Their promotional video was edited in a distinctly brain-rot style: Justin Bieber’s ‘I Feel Funny’ as the soundtrack, pictures of old men flashing over the blue-toned video, hearts edited onto eyes. Over the course of the play’s 2 hours, it swung from the comically absurd to the melodramatically serious, with varying levels of effectiveness.
This production transposed the play to a surreal world of video games and crocheted balaclavas instead of helmets. As I entered the space, I was struck by the use of music that sounded like digital bleeps and at how the bare set had a box TV as the focal point of the stage. During the play it was used variously as a display for the litany of Trojan warriors, as a karaoke machine, and as a method of further alienating the outsider, Thersites, who existed only in the videos that were played on it. The sped-up editing of him whizzing around on different playground equipment to techno music (a style that would have made Baz Lurhmann proud) was one of the many early indicators that this show was seeking to subvert the audience’s expectations.
The figure of Pandarus (the actor has chosen to remain ‘anonymous’), an unsettling cross between C-3PO and Lucius Malfoy, was a highlight of this production’s aim to unnerve. With his iPad in one hand (lines needing to be near as a very recent addition to the cast) and a vape in the other, he spoke his lines liltingly between his blackened teeth. Even his most serious speeches were punctuated by him pausing to take a puff of his vape – a move that never failed to make the audience laugh. His conversation with Alexander (Benjamin Helmer), who laced his lines with an inexplicable southern drawl and a smirk, was one of the funniest moments. Similarly, his karaoke performance of Wanda Jackson’s ‘Funnel of Love’, with his voice swerving between a ludicrous falsetto and chesty bass, had me laughing for minutes on end, even after the next scene had begun.
Cressida (Georgie Cotes) did very well to maintain a dynamic performance when dealing with this absurd Pandarus and shuffling Troilus (Rufus Shutter). Alongside her varied performance, her dress worked to highlight the chameleon nature of her character, changing from black to red to brown depending on the colour of the lights Cotes was standing under. However, the performances of both Cotes and Shutter did tend to be still tableaus of emotion rather than believably reactive, most noticeably in the second half. Their parting scene especially failed to elicit any sympathy from me, as I simply did not believe in their romantic connection – a significant problem given this production had whittled the play down to just their love story. The distress of Troilus that took up much of the second half of the performance felt unwarranted and became monotonous very quickly.
Ultimately, the play failed because it attempted to be sincere – subverting my expectations for the worse. After the first act, I happily believed that the show was one big trolling of the audience. The second half’s lack of absurdity (except a moment when actors onstage converse with the recorded Thersites on the TV) and overemphasis on the tragedy of the lovers was a slap in the face – and a lacklustre one at that. The tone switch had already been undermined given that the first half had worked to inhibit the audience creating emotional connections with the characters through its engagement with the absurd and the quite frankly boring directing of the actors, many of whom were lying down for scenes at a time. In a play that had started so bizarrely, it was remarkable that by the end I only felt one emotion: boredom. This was a play of two halves where the second half tried to doggedly claw its way back on track instead of committing to the bit. Rather than the TROLL-us and Cressida I had hoped for, I left utterly unsatisfied.
