As Shakespeare quickly acknowledges in his prologue to "Troilus and Cressida," "the play starts in the middle." That perfectly suits Michael Boyd, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company production currently at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven.
Boyd embraced the challenge of staging Shakespeare's most ambiguous and least-produced play by employing a directorial approach that he describes as "dive in, everybody, and create a coalition." This method, inspired by Shakespeare's "not taking sides," allows actors and audiences themselves "to discover the play's characters and themes," Boyd contends. "You search for the answer, not me."
The RSC production is at the Long Wharf as part of Yale University's and the city of New Haven's 1999 International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Boyd made his remarks in a question-and-answer session with journalists and other conference attendees, moderated by Festival Director Paul Collard.
Shakespeare's 1602 play is set seven years into the Greek-Trojan War and contains no heroes and few morals. "Shakespeare knew he wouldn't get wide distribution with "Troilus and Cressida'; it was his art-house movie. This freed him up to write a scholarly, dense piece he couldn't have afforded to write for the world [but] it speaks profoundly to what's happening now," said Boyd, "it's millenial-looking at our world and values: we're not sure we trust our leaders, our faith or ourselves. Troilus encapsulates a crisis of confidence in a conflict that isn't noble."
Boyd, 43, was born in Belfast, raised in London, trained at Moscow's Malaya Bronnaya Theatre under the Soviet regime, and spent more than a decade as the founding director of a theatre in a converted church in the working-class East End of Glasgow. This background gave him "a hatred of elitism in the theatre," and "a desire to create as wide an audience as possible."
Boyd's overt contribution to wider audience acceptance in this production is a deliberate mix of designs and styles that he admits "could have become a horrible Irish stew, not going anywhere relevant." He also takes liberties with the text, for example cutting Greek general Ulysses' four-page first-act speech-"unsustainable for a broad-based audience"-down to one page, and he's quite right to have done so.
This "Troilus" is set in the early third of this century, in a white-washed makeshift chapel that seems southern European. The men wear Lloyd George-era three-button suits, and the Greek army is flying bombers. Although Boyd was inspired by the English-Irish conflict in Northern Ireland, he sought to aid Shakespeare's depiction of the obscene violence and futility of all wars.
"Going 20th-century inspired definite physical changes," Boyd acknowledged. When this production opened at the RSC in the fall of 1998, NATO hadn't begun its air strikes against Yugoslavia. "In response to the war, we altered sound cues and rhythms."
Less understandable are such touches as the Hawaiian music that plays whenever the reluctant Greek warrior Achilles and his martini-swilling male lover Patroclus spend a quiet moment alone together. Even more jarring is that Patroclus is played by a woman, Elaine Pyke, and rather well, except for the rigid hip carriage that many actresses affect when playing male roles. This might have been Boyd making a cross-gender point, or a sly reversal of Shakespeare's all-male casting, but it turns out to have been strictly a staffing problem. With only 34 RSC members, including technical personnel, in New Haven, there weren't quite enough young men for the war play. When the Trojan Hector's heart is literally pulled from him, it's a too-realistic animal liver, too close to dinner.
The actors' accents, on purpose, are all over the British Isles, from the Scots burr of the otherwise unmemorable Agamemnon of Sam Graham to the exemplary Troilus of William Houston, whose Oxford garden party accent never met an "r" it wanted to pronounce.
Waving aside a director's duty to help an actor with character development, Boyd said it's the speech and language that he must work on; the rest will come. "You actually teach them iambic pentameter, how to talk in couplets without its sounding phony. I love actors who are a mess all through rehearsal," he says. "It keeps their tubes clean; a character only "prints' when it connects with the audience."
He dismisses preparation in the Stanislavsky or Strasberg styles as "necessary but insufficient." His own goal is to create "an atmosphere of playfulness-theatre is essentially a game being played in public-so that actors can find out something about their characters, not by preconceived notions, but through their own discovery."