1981 Directed by Jonathan Miller
The bitter Trojan War drags on - the Greeks blame Achilles' apathy for low morale, while Troy's hero Hector challenges one of the enemy to a personal duel. And after her father exchanges Cressida for a Trojan prisoner, the war becomes personal for her distraught lover Troilus.
Anton Lesser Suzanne Burden Charles Gray Benjamin Whitrow John Shrapnel Tony Steedman Max Harvey Geoffrey Chater Bernard Brown Kenneth Haigh Jack Birkett Vernon Dobtcheff Peter Walmsley Simon Cutter Esmond Knight Anthony Pedley Elayne Sharling Paul Moriarty Ann Pennington Peter Whitbread David Kinsey Merelina Kendall Cornelius Garrett Tony Portacio Peter J. Cassell Harry Fielder
UK
Germany12
Germany
UK
This has a reputation as a bad play by Shakespeare. But that’s just people playing on the surface and not delving a little deeper to see what wonderful (if sometimes somewhat cynical) poetry is being expressed.
It’s in the text even -
Hector: O! like a book of sport thou’lt read me o’er;
But there’s more in me than thou understand’st.
It’s easy for us to feel hurt by Cressida and reject her actions and believe her when she says it’s her sex so we can just call this play misogynistic and reject the entire enterprise. But my friends the art is under the actions.
Anyway, these BBC productions were allowed to really go for it and they (for the most…
Unlike the 2018 RSC version, the cast here ably keeps pace with the play's rapid-fire tonal shifts, though Aeneas looks old enough to be Nestor and in general the actors seem a little long in the tooth, T&C excepted. Interestingly, it downplays the queerness of Achilles and Patroclus but turns Pandarus into a meddlesome, pearl-clutching old queen, and casts an actual queen — the peerlessly bitchy Jack Birkett, who owns the production — as Thersites.
My first encounter with this play, and... Hm! Very strange narrative from ol' Willie Shakespeare. It's dizzying how it keeps switching from extremely bawdy comedy (this has to be dirtiest Shakespeare play I've seen to date!) to wailing, hair-tearing tragedy. Every character is bitchy and snippy, and there are no clear heroes or villains.
Add to that a very off-beat version of the Trojan war (which I know comes from Shakespeare working mostly with chivalric retellings and less something as straightforward as the Iliad), and I kept getting shocked by the weird twists and turns of the story.
As for the production, at first it felt strange putting a tale of the Trojan war into an extremely Renaissance setting, but…
The one that's The Iliad
Here's where the question first arose: to what degree am I watching a bad adaptation, and to what degree was this a bad script to begin with? There's certainly a lot going against this play. It's over three hours of speechifying about seemingly disconnected offscreen events, without a clear plot or center. The title characters often disappear for a half hour or more, and they play no part in the actual resolution, with most of the actual bulk of the play being a group of undifferentiated bearded men talking about vaguely defined politics in a vaguely defined way-- basically what people who didn't read the books complained about the early seasons of Game of Thrones.…
Film #25 of my 2019/20 - Watching All 37 BBC Shakespearean Films Initiative.
*****
One of Shakespeare's least accessible plays in terms of heightened language and muddled ending. This production is VERY complete - with an over THREE HOUR running time - but this doesn't help with a lot of the flowery language just being too verbose and hard to comprehend without a literary compendium of some sort to help out.
Also, the set design is very sparse (as are most of these BBC productions, granted) which does not aid in understanding the language or story plot points. You have to have a strong familiarity with the material or you will be lost most of the three hours. Not good.…
Unfortunate that the only film or TV version available (ever made?) is such a museum piece rather than really tapping into the toxic masculinity of war.
shakespeare said “listen you can’t get mad at me homer made achilles and patroclus gay i’m just sticking to canon” and then basically wrote iliad fanfic where achilles and pat were quite explicitly lovers and we just let him get away with it. good for him. good. for. him.
they definitely blew their entire budget on that one blown up head at the end didn’t they?
Troilus & Cressida is a play that was apparently never produced at the Globe in Shakespeare's day. It IS atypical, a comedy for the first half, a tragedy in the second, and a history of the last days of the Trojan War besides. Intriguingly, the Bard seems to have read Homer (or more likely, Chaucer) and come out of it wanting to send the whole thing up. So this is rather a clever, deconstructionist satire on heroes, both military and romantic. The great Greek and Trojan heroes of myth are here lazy, stupid, uncommitted and/or treat the war as an inconvenience. The chorus is a grotesque clown who hates everyone, in the BBC production, somewhat offensively played as a flamboyant drag…
