Toxic male Trojans? Troilus and Cressida leads Shakespeare's Globe summer season

Shakespeare’s Globe, London’s home of the Bard and a hell of a lot more, have just announced their Summer season. And it’s going to be a big one.

Associate Artistic Director Sean Holmes will be directing Romeo and Juliet and the Merry Wives of Windsor (4 July – 20 Sept), Ola Ince will be directing Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (8 May to 12 July), Robin Belfield will be directing Twelfth Night (8 Aug to 25th Oct) and there’s a very cool A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Sunday 1th September directed by Blanche McIntyre, where they actors will only meet on the day of the performance. Scary for them, fun for us.

And then there is Troilus and Cressida, which will be directed by Owen Horsley in his Globe debut. Horsley is an Associate Artist at the RSC with many acclaimed productions under his belt including last year’s Twelfth Night at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. But the Globe is a different proposition.

“What I love as an audience member in the Globe is you kind of just can't match the kind of inherent liveness of it,” Horsley tells the Standard, “As a director, you've got to use that. You've got to utilize that connection, which is completely unfiltered in this space.”

And indeed, when it comes to Troilus and Cressida, it may well be a case of audiences experiencing something they are not prepared for. The play is not one of Shakespeare’s most performed plays but they is likely to change following Horsley’s production, as it is one that he feels will resonate with contemporary sensibilities. Since, y’know, it’s very cynical and piss-takey and basically weird.

“It doesn’t have a lead character, it’s a satire, which Shakespeare never really explored after this place, I've always been interested by just how kind of unique it feels as a play,” Horsley says, “It's very anti-war and it presents something that is deeply audacious, very sharp-edged, very clever, which I just think a modern audience don't need translated as much.

“The way this play thinks is no different from the way that we think. As a society, we are quicker to judgment than we are to compassion. This play does exactly that. I mean, the end of this play is so nihilistic. You've got a character kind of giving their diseases to the audience!”

The play is set during a late stage of the Trojan War and depicts the doomed love affair of Troilus, a Trojan Prince, and Cressida, a Trojan woman captured by the Greeks, and is essentially a comedy of manners playing out against the wildly contrasting sides.

“So with the Trojans, you're looking at the presentation of glamour, the glamour of war,” says Horsley, “It’s however many years into the war, and they're still doing these parades that even have a theme tune. As if it’s all worth it.

“And then on the Greek side, you just have this camp, which is just riddled with disease and decay and men who just cannot work together because they're huge egos. Because it's satire, you just go to the extremities of that.”

One of the ways Horsley will be amplifying the satire is to have the same actor playing parts on the Greek and Trojan side, and by ramping up the idea of toxic males.

“It is Shakespeare’s most masculine play ever,” says Horsley, “It is uber male. They constantly talk about Helen being the thing that started a war, but Shakespeare's not starting the war then, he’s jumping eight years in to say, let's think about who's actually continuing this war. It’s not Helen. It’s the men.”

With this kind of apposite material, Horsley says he doesn’t have to actually hammer home the contemporary references much at all; it’s just there. Which isn’t to say that there are big opportunities he will be taking, since the Globe practically demands it.

“I’m really going in with Thersites [the Fool of the play] being the audience’s guide, but a vicious, kind arch guide for the audience. I imagine Thersites will just insult the members of the audience and bring them into that really cynical, judgmental world that has been presented before them.

I think that's the thing that I'm always really interested in, but how do you activate the audience in a space that demands them to be alive in it? Whether they like it or not!”

For more information on the Summer Season head to shakespearesglobe.com