Troilus and Crappida
Sep. 15th, 2009 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charamei"But not all of the Apocrypha are entirely without merit. In fact, one of them, Troilus and Cressida, is hardly crap at all." - The Reduced Shakespeare Company Radio Play
Ah, Reduced Shakespeare Company, why don't I listen to you more often?
Oh, yes - it's because the last time I listened to your summary of a Shakespeare play before going to see it, I spent the whole of Hamlet hearing your voices adding jokes to the ends of perfectly serious lines, which kind of ruined it for me. But still.
Anyway,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aleas_iacta and I went to see Troilus and Cressida at the Globe on Saturday. I am... confused.
To quote Mark Twain, Troilus and Cressida is both original and very good. Unfortunately, the part that is very good is not original, and the part that is original...
So basically, it's a rewrite of the Iliad with Romeo and Juliet interspersed. The Iliad part of the plot - a term I use in its loosest sense - is, as expected, very good. Damn, but Homer knew how to tell a story. The Romeo and Juliet part is only a tiny portion of the play, and it's predictable, somewhat dull, and confusing.
I don't think the confusion is the fault of the poet, though. From what I could tell when I read up on it afterwards, Cressida is supposed to come across as flighty and false, genuinely in love with both Troilus and Diomedes: but Laura Pyper played it more as though she's, well, a slave-girl being forced to have sex against her will. It's certainly truer to life; I'm just not sure if it was a good idea, since the subsequent focus on how betrayed and sympathetic Troilus is left me thoroughly bemused. He didn't come across as the sympathetic character; Cressida did, which upset the balance of the second half.
And speaking of sympathetic characters, Will, you really buggered up Hector and Achilles.
Hector first. The scene with Andromache is probably one of the sweetest in the Iliad. We get to see Hector's human side as he plays with his son and reassures his wife, whose dignity in the face of his possible demise speaks volumes for her own grace and humanity, and it reinforces what the Trojans have to lose by letting the Greeks tear their city down. In the Iliad.
In the Globe's Troilus and Cressida, Andromache was a whiny, screaming, hysterical lump on a level with Cassandra, and Hector reacted to her in much the same way as Petruchio does Kate in Taming of the Shrew.
As far as I can tell, this is mostly Shakespeare's script. Interesting how times change, isn't it? The Elizabethan version is far more sexist than the Homeric one; in Homer, we get a sense of a functioning family unit, and there's no question but that Andromache is a strong woman in her own way, or that Hector is a good man. Yes, an Elizabethan audience would probably have seen Hector as a good man even through that scene; nonetheless, his portrayal is hardly as sympathetic as it is in Homer. Which leaves Achilles as the good guy, of c-
Oh, wait. No.
A moment to squee: Trystan Gravelle as Achilles made this play. The eyeshadow! The pigtails! The bathrobe and the lounging! Thje obvious homosexuality! The stunning lack of any sort of wrath whatsoever! The mobbing of Hector, unarmed and alone, at the end! Wait...
See, for all that Gravelle managed 'camp and apathetic' brilliantly, he didn't seem angry: and when you're playing the man whose divine anger was so great that he could not contain it, that's a problem. As for the fight with Hector, well, when Hector wonaleas_iacta and I looked at one another, blinked, and missed the next few minutes of the play whispering in cofusion. We returned to the play just in time to see Achilles come back in with a lynch mob of Myrmidons and corner an unarmed Hector.
WTF?
Seriously, Will. WTF?
In two strokes of a pen, Hector is a wife-beater and Achilles a coward. This is not the Iliad I signed up to see.
Look, Achilles behaves disgracefully enough in that scene in the original. He ties Hector's body to his chariot and drags it around after him, for crying out loud. The scene gains nothing by having him also mob Hector and murder an unarmed man.
And then comes the ending. Troilus is still trying to convince me he's the sympathetic character, I'm still rooting for Cressida, I didn't care when Hector died because his vital characterisation moment was screwed up, Achilles is a camp wuss cheater, and Pandarus - who should have died back in Book Five - has just come on to whine about his miserable life as a go-between for two lovers who I don't really care about anyway.
Oh, and Nestor is Father Christmas with a Scottish accent. Which was weird.
The play, being a history, has no real resolution, and the ending of the Iliad is horribly mangled. What. The. Hell.
I think the moral of this story is: no matter how good you are at retelling old stories for a modern age, don't mess with the Iliad. It's good enough already, and if Shakespeare couldn't make it work, then it's doubtful anybody else can either.
I'm going to have to get hold of The Myth Makers on audio. It's probable that running Troilus and Cressida through the Doctor Who filter - especially the Hartnell filter - made it into a genuinely enjoyable story at last.
(Also, I finished my dissertation. Go me!)
Ah, Reduced Shakespeare Company, why don't I listen to you more often?
Oh, yes - it's because the last time I listened to your summary of a Shakespeare play before going to see it, I spent the whole of Hamlet hearing your voices adding jokes to the ends of perfectly serious lines, which kind of ruined it for me. But still.
Anyway,
aleas_iacta and I went to see Troilus and Cressida at the Globe on Saturday. I am... confused.To quote Mark Twain, Troilus and Cressida is both original and very good. Unfortunately, the part that is very good is not original, and the part that is original...
So basically, it's a rewrite of the Iliad with Romeo and Juliet interspersed. The Iliad part of the plot - a term I use in its loosest sense - is, as expected, very good. Damn, but Homer knew how to tell a story. The Romeo and Juliet part is only a tiny portion of the play, and it's predictable, somewhat dull, and confusing.
I don't think the confusion is the fault of the poet, though. From what I could tell when I read up on it afterwards, Cressida is supposed to come across as flighty and false, genuinely in love with both Troilus and Diomedes: but Laura Pyper played it more as though she's, well, a slave-girl being forced to have sex against her will. It's certainly truer to life; I'm just not sure if it was a good idea, since the subsequent focus on how betrayed and sympathetic Troilus is left me thoroughly bemused. He didn't come across as the sympathetic character; Cressida did, which upset the balance of the second half.
And speaking of sympathetic characters, Will, you really buggered up Hector and Achilles.
Hector first. The scene with Andromache is probably one of the sweetest in the Iliad. We get to see Hector's human side as he plays with his son and reassures his wife, whose dignity in the face of his possible demise speaks volumes for her own grace and humanity, and it reinforces what the Trojans have to lose by letting the Greeks tear their city down. In the Iliad.
In the Globe's Troilus and Cressida, Andromache was a whiny, screaming, hysterical lump on a level with Cassandra, and Hector reacted to her in much the same way as Petruchio does Kate in Taming of the Shrew.
As far as I can tell, this is mostly Shakespeare's script. Interesting how times change, isn't it? The Elizabethan version is far more sexist than the Homeric one; in Homer, we get a sense of a functioning family unit, and there's no question but that Andromache is a strong woman in her own way, or that Hector is a good man. Yes, an Elizabethan audience would probably have seen Hector as a good man even through that scene; nonetheless, his portrayal is hardly as sympathetic as it is in Homer. Which leaves Achilles as the good guy, of c-
Oh, wait. No.
A moment to squee: Trystan Gravelle as Achilles made this play. The eyeshadow! The pigtails! The bathrobe and the lounging! Thje obvious homosexuality! The stunning lack of any sort of wrath whatsoever! The mobbing of Hector, unarmed and alone, at the end! Wait...
See, for all that Gravelle managed 'camp and apathetic' brilliantly, he didn't seem angry: and when you're playing the man whose divine anger was so great that he could not contain it, that's a problem. As for the fight with Hector, well, when Hector won
aleas_iacta and I looked at one another, blinked, and missed the next few minutes of the play whispering in cofusion. We returned to the play just in time to see Achilles come back in with a lynch mob of Myrmidons and corner an unarmed Hector.WTF?
Seriously, Will. WTF?
In two strokes of a pen, Hector is a wife-beater and Achilles a coward. This is not the Iliad I signed up to see.
Look, Achilles behaves disgracefully enough in that scene in the original. He ties Hector's body to his chariot and drags it around after him, for crying out loud. The scene gains nothing by having him also mob Hector and murder an unarmed man.
And then comes the ending. Troilus is still trying to convince me he's the sympathetic character, I'm still rooting for Cressida, I didn't care when Hector died because his vital characterisation moment was screwed up, Achilles is a camp wuss cheater, and Pandarus - who should have died back in Book Five - has just come on to whine about his miserable life as a go-between for two lovers who I don't really care about anyway.
Oh, and Nestor is Father Christmas with a Scottish accent. Which was weird.
The play, being a history, has no real resolution, and the ending of the Iliad is horribly mangled. What. The. Hell.
I think the moral of this story is: no matter how good you are at retelling old stories for a modern age, don't mess with the Iliad. It's good enough already, and if Shakespeare couldn't make it work, then it's doubtful anybody else can either.
I'm going to have to get hold of The Myth Makers on audio. It's probable that running Troilus and Cressida through the Doctor Who filter - especially the Hartnell filter - made it into a genuinely enjoyable story at last.
(Also, I finished my dissertation. Go me!)
