Writer: William Shakespeare
Director: Owen Horsley
In the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Troilus and Cressida is tucked in between the Comedies and the Tragedies, belonging to both and neither. Owen Horsley has directed a bold, brash spectacle that embraces that confusion, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, which seems appropriate.
The first half is a camp classic, the sort of broad farce that brought smiles to the nation’s eyes with Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the BBC’s 50-year-old Up Pompeii. Samantha Spiro, as a cross-gendered Pandarus, channels a gurning Frankie Howerd with her fourth-wall-breaking and her elbow-in-the-ribs asides. The Trojan warriors enter in exaggerated muscle armour, camping it up like pro wrestlers. It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt. The somebody in this case is Charlotte O’Leary’s Cressida.
The second half, emblematically assisted by sheeting rain falling on the groundlings and making for very uncertain footing downstage, is much darker. There is abuse and treachery and murder, there is mockery that was blustery banter before the interval, but leaves a much nastier taste when it’s the forerunner to a knife in the back. The tonal shift is abrupt and hard to navigate.
The actors that most successfully ride the shift are Spiro, and Lucy McCormick, doubling as the bitter and twisted Thersites, ‘a slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint’ to quote Ulysses’ epic monologue, and the paradigm of beauty, Helen. She brings elements of Helen’s beauty into her characterisation of Thersites, and a lot of Thersites’ grotesquery into her portrayal of Helen. It is sometimes hard to make out what she says, but never hard to know what she means. Thersites starts the play with a bang and slides in and out of the warring/partying factions. It is a very impressive performance.
Spiro’s Pandarus is a gossipy, ingratiating auntie, a well-meaning busybody who wants everyone to be happy, until she isn’t, and she stands exposed as a procuress, a pimp. Spiro hints at the grotesque with her drag-act costume and her exaggerated accent, and renders the tonal shift logical. Some of her fellow cast members are stuck in the camp farce of part one even as they deal with the active nastiness of part two, but Spiro is on point throughout. She is the centre of the show, and she is brilliant.
David Caves’s gone-to-seed Achilles, muscle armour straining over a beer-belly, is also very much at home in the two parts. Ryan Dawson Laight provides eye-catching design, with costumes ranging seamlessly between bronze armour and peach jogging bottoms, and a stage focused on a large severed foot with no explanation. It’s that sort of show.
This is a brave reading of a difficult play. It has a lot of funny bits, a lot of startling moments, and tries to get round the fact that, even though Shakespeare named the play for the lovers, Troilus and Cressida really aren’t the main attraction. That’s Shakespeare’s choice, not Owen Horsley, and he deals with it commendably.
Always intriguing, not always convincing, effortlessly eye-catching, and a commendable tour de force for Samantha Spiro.
Runs until 26 October 2025
