Questioning the male animal at his most controlling: Southbank's 'Troilus and Cressida"

Troilus and Cressida dance their romantic bond.

Patches of great writing close to the Bard's highest level can't smooth the way in the late "problem play" he drew from the fabled Trojan War recounted in Homer's "Iliad." As adapted to focus more on the plight of women in ancient Troy as Greek invaders laid siege, "Troilus and Cressida: The Musical" brings Marcia Eppich-Harris' ambitious grasp of the classics to the fore of Southbank Theatre Company's offerings in its short history. 

The Shakespeare play's tangles of plot and character remain, though the abundance of songs lends plenty of melodic lilt to a dramatic structure rife with hyperactive masculinity and the cynicism and hypocrisy that often accompany it. There may be too many songs: Some are sketches, yet apt to their dramatic moment. But the abundance occasionally leads to their coming across sketchily in performance. 

Military values are sturdily upheld in the classics, a fact that challenges the liberal mindset that governs modern literary taste. If "Troilus and Cressida"'s antimilitary heft can be bent a little further to skewer the enduring tendency to objectify women, Eppich-Harris is all for it in this two-and-a-half hour adaptation designed for our times.

The war-weary note is sounded immediately in the opening ensemble. The first scene establishes a 21st-century ethos: War compounded by an endless siege is enervating and serves to leach all positive values from both sides of the conflict. Here, the struggle originated in the abduction of high-status Helen from her Greek homeland. How the entrenched enmity drew from Shakespeare such elaborate rhetoric from many of the characters poses an interpretive challenge. The essayist Harold Goddard describes the play's milieu as "a pit of intellectuals." In Eppich-Harris' musical version, intellectual vigor is perhaps sensibly underplayed in order to emphasize the difficulty of representing female identity and agency. The emotional toll is uppermost, and the word "pit" nails it.

Among the warriors: Greek general Agamemnon

The ensemble number that overlays "Seven Long Years," the opening chorus, upon "Love, Love, Love" is  the show's most pointed highlighting of the story's contradictions. Can genuine love thrive in an environment where lovers are treated  (and may even regard themselves) as bargaining chips in a protracted Mediterranean power struggle? 

The question is effectively posed to end the first act. The answer is "no," with the fervent cynicism of Thersites, a Greek hanger-on brightly played by Anthony Nathan, carrying the theme throughout the show. Nathan's comical interpretation was fun but startling, given the character's scurrilous temperament and the way his speeches drag the "philosophy" of the play toward nihilism. We are invited to laugh along to the brink with him. 

Coordination of vocalism with a small backstage ensemble (directed by Seth Young) was good, though sometimes its amplified accompaniment almost covered the singers. Clearly Eppich-Harris wanted to avoid songs standing out as expressive high points pausing the action, as they do in the genre's American classics. This show's music nearly overshadows what's conveyed by the severely cut text, but fresh creativity gets the production's point across.

Vocal adeptness among the cast varied widely, especially in the solos. Some combinations were effective  both dramatically and vocally: "Don't Fight Today" made the prophetess Cassandra (Yolanda Valdivia) and the anxious Trojan wife Andromache (Jennifer J. Kaufmann) expressive partners, joined in a trio climax with Hector, doomed Trojan prince and Andromache's husband (Robert Beltz). The gift of unheeded prophecy overlaps with intuitive dread in this number, and that mixture distantly joins Homer and Shakespeare in a gripping song.

Hard as it is to put aside the exigencies of military conflict, the audience's attention is justifiably focused on the title characters, plus the dangerously clever man who brings them together, Cressida's uncle Pandarus. Played with calculated zest by Paul Hansen, Pandarus exemplifies the role of liaison-builders in reconstituting "the eternal triangle" of romantic relationships: there are two lovers, then the catalytic go-between. True tenderness nonetheless shines in the performances of Matthew Walls and Amalia Howard. 

But how much should we take Troilus' lovesick devotion as performative and how much as genuine? The question, like many that arise about both Shakespeare's play and Eppich-Harris' version, remains unsettled.  The show's all-embracing finale, however, offers (as concluding onstage music so often does) a plausible resolution and provisional thread-tying. To this day, more relationships than we might wish turn out to be transactional. "Troilus and Cressida: The Musical" makes novel entertainment out of that old difficulty. 

[Photos: Ghost Light Photography]