Jack Landau, whose Stratford (Connecticut) Playhouse specialized in staging the more popular Shakespeare plays with high profile actors from the nearby New York commercial stage, ventured a radical take on the play in 1961.  Inspired by the beginning of the centennial observances that year, he set the action in the US Civil War and punctuated the battle scenes with piercing rebel yells.  It did not please everyone.  Howard Taubman of the New York Times said of the production that it "verges on puerility.  It achieves a noisy silliness worthy of Westerns but not of Shakespeare."  Be that as it may, Landau assembled a distinguished cast, including Carrie Nye as Cressida, Jessica Tandy as Cassandra, Kim Hunter as Helen, and Pat Hingle as Hector.  Will Geer, still barred from film and television by the McCarthy-era blacklist, played Priam, leading the lost cause of Troy as Robert E. Lee.

Later that same year Howard Sackler assembled one of the best casts ever to undertake the play for the Caedmon audio recording, a version that is still available.   As the lovers, he had Jeremy Brett, who had been Guthrie's Patroclus, and Diane Cilento.  Alan Howard, who would later play Achilles at Stratford, played Hector on the recording and the brilliant Irish character actor Cyril Cussack played a bitter snarling Thersites.  Max Adrian's Pandarus was saved for posterity at least on vinyl . Patricia Routledge was Helen. Derek Godfrey, Peter Bayliss, and Alec McCowen played the Greek heroes Achilles, Ajax, and Diomedes.   Eric Porter, who had played Ulysses for Hall and Burton at Stratford, returned to the role for the recording.  The play was recorded again in 1981 by the BBC for a set distributed by Audio Forum, this time starring Michael Pennington and Maureen O'Brien.  Norman Rodway played Ulysses, Nigel Stock, Pandarus, and Alan Howard was Thersites.

The next east coast US production of the 1960's handled the material more respectfully than did Landau’s production in nearby Stratford.  In 1965 Joseph Papp directed the play on his open-air Central Park stage with a background of soaring pillars by Ming Cho Lee.  Theoni Aldredge costumed the players in high quality ancient robes and armor.  In line with his pioneering loyalty to “color blind” casting, Papp presented several young African-American actors in major roles.  James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Brown, and Al Freeman, Jr., played Greek commanders Ajax, Ulysses, and Diomedes, Bill Gunn was Patroclus, and Jane White portrayed Helen.  Papp’s production emphasized the heroine’s vulnerability.  "Cressida's downfall," he decided, "is given impetus by Troilus' inability to love.  Cressida, in spite of her character, is the more capable of love,…"   Papp had a difficult time convincing his Troilus, Richard Jordan, "that he was a cad and Cressida, his victim."  Papp would not be the first to urge this feminist re-interpretation, but it would more often be taken up by defiant actresses than by male directors.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's John Barton directed Michael Williams as Troilus and Helen Mirren, appearing for her first season with the company, as Cressida, in 1968.  Alan Howard played Achilles and David Waller Patroclus as a more flamboyantly and openly "gay" couple than the Grecian friends had been in any earlier stagings.  Patrick Stewart was a stern Hector, David Waller played Pandarus, and Ben Kingsley Aeneas.

In 1976 the play experienced a flurry of new stagings on both sides of the Atlantic.  The National Theatre planned to open the new Cottesloe with Troilus and Cressida, but the space was not ready and director Elijah Moshinsky's production opened at the Old Vic instead.  John Barton returned to the material at The Royal Shakespeare Company, this time assisted by Barry Kyle.  Amidst the dispiriting warfare, with no one very sure why they were fighting, the play's gay content was played for all its high camp possibilities, Achilles and Patroclus holding hands as they strolled through the camp. Tony Church, who was to play Pandarus in later productions, including Peter Hall's for TFANA, appeared this time as Ulysses.  At Yale Repertory Alvin Epstein directed Dan Hamilton and Laurie Heineman in the title roles, with Yale Rep veteran Jeremy Geidt as Pandarus.  The West Indian dancer/choreographer Carmen de Lavallade was Helen.  Walter Kerr remarked on the unexpected innocence of the proceedings. He found it had a "positively virginal quality that goes directly counter to our expectations."  San Diego National Shakespeare Festival at the Old Globe theater added the novel twist of holding the Trojan war council in a steam bath.  Robert Burke and Pamela Payton-Wright played the lovers under the direction of Edward Payson Call.

In 1977 director Ronald Hayman did Poel one better in his gender casting, reversing all the roles for his London production in Camden Town's Roundhouse Downstairs.  The following year John Wood, who had been Guthrie's Helenus in 1956, returned to the material when he directed it for Canada's National Arts Theatre in Ottawa.  The gay undertones here were accentuated by a Trojan council of war held, much as it had been the previous year in San Diego, in a sauna with near-naked men massaging and being massaged.  In the same year the show re-appeared in Eastern Europe in a Warsaw production. whose revolving stage emphasized that the two warring armies were two sides of the same world, perhaps reflecting growing disenchantment with the Cold War.

Two productions in 1981 helped secure the play’s place in the accepted repertory.  In his first year as the new artistic director of the BBC's project to film all of the Shakespeare canon, a venture whose opening product had been widely panned, Jonathan Miller set out to re-envision the Trojan play.  With Anton Lesser as an ardent Troilus and Suzanne Burden insisting on playing a sympathetic and determined Cressida, the central love story took on a dynamic life that few productions have managed.  Charles Gray's decadent Pandarus lent the proceedings a nasty edge, but Miller's most impressive casting coup was the choice of the blind cabaret artist Jack Birkett to play Thersites as his signature stage creation "The Incredible Orlando."

The same year at London’s Aldwych Theatre, Terry Hands directed an impressive cast that included David Suchet as Achilles and James Hazeldine and Carol Royle as the lovers. The Trojans wore more or less classical costumes while the Greeks were dressed for World War I trench warfare.  David Nokes described the play as "a cartoon strip of grotesque images, crude, glaring and spectacular." Tony Church was Pandarus, the role to which he would return in Peter Hall's Theater for a New Audience staging.  In Nunn's staging he delivered
the final Epilogue while snarled in barbed wire.

The Royal Shakespeare Company staged the play again in 1985, this time with Howard Davies directing. Anton Lesser was paired with another strong Cressida, this time in the person of Juliet Stevenson, who, like Burden, insisted on playing a sympathetic heroine, victimized by the men around her.  The action of the play was set in what looked like a decaying mansion, with costumes summoning up another era of heroic futility, the Crimean War, and anachronistic additions like a flash camera to capture Achilles and Hector shaking hands and machine guns to dispatch the Trojan hero.

Andrei Belgrader staged the play for New Haven's Yale Repertory in 1990 with Bill Camp and Cindy Katz (Helen in the TFANA production) in the title roles.  John Turturro played Thersites and, for the role of Pandarus, Belgrader sought the unusual talents of New York performance artist Ethyl Eichelberger.  The sets and costumes made the struggle look, as one review put it, "like a war between India and Australia."

Two German productions of the mid-eighties, one from the West and one from the East, perhaps demonstrated the increasing sense of absurdity with which both sides of the Iron Curtain viewed the prolonged  Cold War in the Reagan era.  In 1986 at the Munich Kammerspeile, and later at the Berlin Theatertreffen, director Dieter Dorn, set the play before "graffiti-smeared walls," which, to a Berlin audience, could suggest only one notorious wall.  Critics polled by the prestigious Theater Heute voted the production “Best Play” of the 1985-86 season.  The following year the Berliner Ensemble brought Manfred Wekwerth's staging of his own translation of the play to King's Theater,  London, in a season with The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Thersites was played by the company's redoubtable Ekkehard Schall.  The staging was Brechtian as only the Ensemble could be -- with a set that was constantly refigured out of a huge white sheet.

The first production of the 1990's opened at The RSC's Swan Theatre in Stratford, with Ralph Fiennes and Amanda Root as the lovers, Norman Rodway as Pandarus, and Simon Russell Beale as Thersites.  Sam Mendes’s edgy direction emphasized the play’s unnerving qualities.  Its style was self-consciously eclectic, in costume, set, and conception, all working together, however, to emphasize the sordidness of the events portrayed.

The disillusion that is at the heart of the play has made it ever more attractive to our own post-modern disenchantment.  Productions strive for new effects and more surprising analogies, as in two very adventuresome stagings, each of which opened in 1993.  In Manchester, for a co-production of Contact Theater and Tara Arts, Jatinder Verma directed seven actors playing multiple roles with frequent gender bending.  He replaced the play's prologue with Queen Elizabeth I's 1601 decree expelling all blackamoors to Spain.  In the same year, across the channel in Rotterdam, a company called "Maatwerk" featured a cast of fifteen actors under the direction of Koert Dekker.  All of the players had Down's Syndrome.  The production was the subject of a documentary film.

Back in the United States the New York Shakespeare Festival returned to the material again in 1995 with another outdoor production, this time staged by British director Mark Wing-Davey.  He followed the post-sixties fashion by conspicuously playing up the decadence of the play's sexuality.  In his scene with Paris and Helen, Pandarus' strap-on dildo plays a supporting role, rising and falling to punctuate the eroticism of his song.  The color-blind casting that had, by the nineties, become one of the hallmarks of the New York Shakespeare Festival, survived Joseph Papp's death and, under the artistic direction of George Wolfe, is now an established aspect of their productions.  Like Papp, Davey featured a black actress, Tamara Tunie, as the sex-idol Helen. But Davey could be criticized for reinforcing some other stereotypes.  Papp had cast a thoughtful Roscoe Lee Brown as Ulysses, but in this staging black actors generally played "brawn" and the whites were the "brains."  Patroclus was flamboyantly gay, as had become the norm.  To lessen the ambiguity about Achilles’ sexual orientation Davey cut all reference to his love for Priam's daughter, tacitly accepting the suggestion that he had left the fighting to humor his boyfriend Patroclus.  Why the latter returned to the fray alone was left to the audience to puzzle out for themselves.

As if the play's decadence and cynicism somehow meshed with the mood of the fin de siecle, the late nineties saw a flurry of high-profile London stagings.  The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1996 production featured Ralph Fiennes' younger brother, Joseph, soon to star in Shakespeare in Love, as Troilus opposite Victoria Hamilton.  London's Open Air Theatre staged the play in 1998 in a modern dress version directed by Alan Strachen.  The same year, Michael Boyd staged the Royal Shakespeare Company's final Troilus and Cressida of the century, in what a press release called a "20th Century urban landscape with echoes of Ireland, the Balkans, and the Spanish Civil War."

With the twentieth century production history in mind, a few things can be said about the Theater for a New Audience staging.  Hall followed a tradition going back to Poel of setting the action on an essentially bare stage, uncluttered by scenery, pictorial backdrops, or any elaborate stage machinery.

Since Barton in his 1968 production openly embraced the emerging "gay" culture, most directors have aggressively "outed" Achilles and his companion Patroclus.  The most notable exception was Jonathan Miller, whose BBC venue perhaps discouraged such a provocative gesture.  His sole nod to effeminate manhood was his fey transvestite Thersites.  Like Miller, Hall presented an Achilles who was not outlandishly "swish."  Idris Elba presented the outward appearance of an aggressively masculine, and habitually drunken, brawler. Consequently, Luke Kirby's Patroclus suggested a vulnerable, effeminate young man who has "hooked up" with a brawny convict in a dangerous, all-male, environment.  The fact that, when available, a female object could also arouse Achilles' desires is a welcome reminder of the true complexity of human sexual dynamics, where sexual identity may not be so unambiguous as pop culture would like us to believe.  What's more, this "situational homosexuality" accurately reflects centuries (millennia?) of pre-Clinton era military "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policies.  Hall's more restrained staging of the play's homosexual subtext becomes, then, every bit as groundbreaking as Barton's adventurous gesture was in the pre-Stonewall late sixties.

Joseph Papp in 1965 anticipated feminist criticisms of the play's traditional interpretation of the heroine's behavior, readings that had justified the simile "As false as Cressida."  At least two productions, Miller's BBC film of 1981 and Howard Davies' 1985 Royal Shakespeare staging, were marked by strong disagreements between director and leading actress over how to present Cressida.  In both cases the actresses, Suzanne Burden and Juliet Stevenson, wished to play against the traditions of the fickle minx to which their directors were committed.  Both actresses played the heroine as more vulnerable, canny, and sympathetic than the production tradition normally allowed.  Their Cressidas were aware of their peril at the hands of both Pandarus and Troilus, men who pretended to care for them but who would quickly yield them up to political necessity.  Their Cressidas' "betrayal" of their lover is less a sign of fickle affections than of realistic survival instincts in the hostile world of ruthless and aggressive men and a refusal to accept their victimization.  Tricia Paolucci's performance in Hall's staging partook of this feminist tendency.  She was defiant in the face of her rough handling at the hands of the Greek commanders, retorting with bitter cleverness to their physical and verbal aggression, but the incident clearly put her in need of Diomedes' protection.  Her subsequent surrender of Troilus' token was the result of a painful battle with herself, not the whim of a light and transient affection.

Sir Peter Hall drew on over forty years of thought and experience with Troilus and Cressida, as a student and as a director, when he took on the challenge of staging it for Theatre for a New Audience.  He kept what worked in his 1960 production, but profited from the experiments of other directors in subsequent years, stayed open to what his talented cast brought to the rehearsal process, and continued to think hard and intelligently about this most extraordinary play.