18 MARCH 1922, Page 15

THE THEATRE.

" TROILUS AND CRESSIDA " AT CAMBRIDGE.

I HAVE never felt quite sure about Shakespeare's meaning in Troilus and Cressida. Perhaps in presenting confusion, and being himself a little confused, he merely wanted to convey an

idea of "the fog of war," thus being ahead of our modem military thinkers just as he anticipated the thoughts of many

thinkers on many other subjects. But the producer of Troilus and Cressida, which has just been played by the Marlowe Society at Cambridge, seems to have no doubt about Shakespeare's

meaning. Raving seen the performance I must confess that the producer has convinced me. Indeed, I have never seen a play in which a performance threw so much light upon the text.

The Cambridge producer plainly believes that Shakespeare wanted to show the disenchanting side of war and therefore

wrote of superfluous slaughter, of the dark underside of martial prowess, of frothy bullies, and of the general moral decline which drags down Cressida with the rest and makes her a wanton. This theory entirely fits in with the part of Thersites, whose scarifying sarcasm is a running commentary on that heroic period.

It may be said that as we are all just now in the mood of disenchantment about war, the Cambridge producer has merely read the mood of the moment into the play. But I do not think that the objection is just. Rather, the producer chose the play because he saw in it an old and apt expression of what the wheel of time has brought us back to. Possibly he recog- nized the appropriateness of playing Troilus and Cressida in Cambridge—where, by the way, tradition says that the play was originally produced—not long after the performance of the Aeschylean trilogy. For does not Agamemnon tell exactly the same story of disenchantment—the sufferings of the soldier at the front, the seamy side of glory, and the return home of the demobilized soldiers to find their jobs taken by embusgetes and their wives in the arms of strange lovers ?

But I must not dwell on the meaning of the play, though the interpretation of the Marlowe Society was extraordinarily interesting. I want to say chiefly that I have never listened to a Shakespearean performance which gave me purer pleasure because of the excellent way in which the lines were said. Ulysses—I cannot give him his own name as all the players were anonymous—had not only a beautiful voice, but a voice with quite an unusual range of modulation. The lines were said by all the players truly and scrupulously as blank verse, and this without doing any detriment to the action. If I were a professional producer of Shakespearean plays I should spend a definite proportion of the sum allotted to me for production in taking my company to Cambridge to hear the next pro- duction of a Shakespearean play, or any other Elizabethan play, by the Marlowe Society. I have read several notices of the performance at Cambridge, but not one of them, to my mind, did justice to the noble way in which the language of Shakespeare was said.

For the rest you might have searched England to find finer figures of men for the principal Greeks and Trojans. When Achilles and Hector faced one another one felt from the mere vision of stature and power that there was going to be " some " combat. And Ajax was just as big—perhaps bigger. Shake- speare, you will remember, makes Ajax a brawny, brainless slogger. The expression of beefy stupidity assumed throughout by Ajax was a masterpiece in its way, and gave a splendid point to all the bating which he has to endure, particularly from the sardonic Thersites. The women's parts, taken by men, were bound to be a weakness. All I can say is, that one prefers that a man acting a woman's part should consent to be thought histrionically weak rather than aim at a realism which, par- ticularly in such parts as those of Cressida and Helen, could