In the spring of 2001, at The American Place Theatre in New York City, Theater for a New Audience presented a production of Troilus and Cressida, directed by Sir Peter Hall. Any production of this challenging and disturbing play is noteworthy, as it is so rarely performed, but one directed by Sir Peter, who, among his many other achievements, was one of the founders of the Royal Shakespeare Company, certainly should not pass without comment and consideration.

 

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The mini-essays that follow are intended to provide exactly that, by focusing on a number of individual scenes and characters as they were handled in this production and in the history of the performance of a play, which only in the last hundred years has begun to find its audience.

The play speaks powerfully to a modern sensibility; indeed it may be part of what has formed it.   We have come to see Troilus and Cressida as a play profoundly about war: why it is fought, how it is justified, and what it costs both its winners and losers (if the difference can in fact be discerned).   Whatever it is, the play says, war is never glorious, however much some may pretend it is, and in Hall’s provocative production, Troilus and Cressida tells us the squalid truth about the realities of war, which rarely ennobles, in spite of the familiar martial rhetoric that dresses it, but usually degrades -- whether on the field of the most famous war of the classical world that play presents or on the all-too-familiar battlefields of our own time.

All quotations from the play are taken from The Arden Shakespeare (Third Edition), edited by David Bevington.

David Scott Kastan is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.

Tom Dale Keever is a Fellow at Columbia University, pursuing a PhD in Theatre, and teaches as an Adjunct Instructor at Fordham and Marymount Manhattan. He has worked in the professional theatre as an actor, director, designer, and stage manager.