For some years I had been trying to lure Michael Bogdanov to come from England and work for Bell Shakespeare. I had been impressed by his English Shakespeare Company’s Wars of the Roses and knocked out by his Taming of the Shrew in Stratford. We had corresponded and met a couple of times at conferences but I had the impression that, like most Britishers, he didn’t have a high opinion of, or much interest in, the Australian theatre scene—and it was a long way to come for a busy man.

Leo Schofield was director of the Sydney Olympics Festival for the year 2000 and said he was open to suggestions if I could find an interesting product and artist of international standing. Troilus and Cressida was a play I had wanted to do for some time, but I knew it could be death at the box office. Still, I thought it could attract a festival audience and might appeal to Bogdanov. He leapt at the chance of being here for the Olympics and seeing something of the country as well. But he didn’t come cheap: he would bring his partner (who was also his costume designer), two children, their ‘nanny’, his own fight director and weapons. We would also have to provide him with a house and a car. None of this would be possible without the festival’s involvement. Happily, Leo responded positively and the deal was struck.

Even so, Michael’s original ideas were challenging. He wanted to enlarge the stage of the Sydney Opera House Playhouse, take out all the seats and cover the stage in mud six inches deep. An armed personnel carrier or jeep must also be got on stage. Well, little by little these ideas were compromised. There was no way the Opera House would let us rebuild the stage, dump six inches of mud on it or take out the seats. But Michael Scott-Mitchell’s imaginative design did succeed in making the space a lot bigger, and enough mud was employed to convey the desired effect. We had a large cast (twenty) with quite a few grizzled veterans, including myself as Ulysses, because Michael’s idea was that the Greeks had been sitting out the siege of Troy in their makeshift camp for eleven years. They were no longer the heroic warriors of The Odyssey but had grown decrepit and gone to seed through lack of action. Achilles was flabby and overweight, and Patroclus, his catamite, was a daffy old queen with lots of makeup and a cardigan. The Trojans, meanwhile, sat all day in their spa pool, or else lolled around in towels, discussing strategy. The show was held together by Pandarus, transformed by Bille Brown into ‘Uncle Pandy’, a talk-show host in toupee and cravat who roamed about the stage and through the audience with a hand mic, accompanied by live video cameras, relaying onto large screens both the stage action and audience response. There was a good deal of nudity in the show (which undoubtedly boosted ticket sales) and a scene of two scantily clad girls mud-wrestling for the amusement of the Greek soldiers.

I was impressed with the pains Bogdanov took over the authenticity of the props and achieving desired effects. Even though we were running well behind schedule in production week, he spent hours rehearsing the killing of Hector, who had to be bound, hoisted up by the feet and have his throat cut in such a way that the blood spurted right across the stage. I admired Michael’s concern with detail and specifics, the time he took with pulleys and blood bags.

Written around 1602, Troilus and Cressida sits alongside other dark and troubling plays like Measure for Measure and Timon of Athens but is nastier than either of them. Shakespeare sets out to utterly subvert the myth of the Trojan War, so idealised by the Elizabethans as an tribute to heroic deeds and the glory of war. In his version the noble Hector is most vilely betrayed by Achilles, stabbed in the back by his Myrmidons. This is no heroic tale, but as the spiteful Thersites puts it:

All the argument is a whore and a cuckold—a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon.

Now the dry Serpigo on the subject, and war and lechery confound all!

Bogdanov was right to stress the squalor and ugliness of the campaign and show war as inglorious and wasteful. This message is at the heart of the play, which suggests there can never be any such thing as a moral absolute: the only values are those responsive to time and fashion. Whatever drove Shakespeare to write the piece, it appeals very much to modern sensibilities. We can accept its cynicism, its lack of optimism, its bitterness and sense of dislocation.

To mitigate the bleakness we have, as always, Shakespeare’s sense of humour. Pandarus, vain, fluttering and epicene, is a hugely amusing character; and the vitriolic Thersites is devastatingly funny in his critique of heroic posturing. The epilogue, which generally serves to flatter the audience and thank them for their attention, is here delivered by the disillusioned and rejected Pandarus. He addresses us as if we are all, like him, pimps and bawds:

Brothers and sisters of the hold-door trade,

Some two months hence my will shall here be made

Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,

And at that time bequeath you my diseases.

But Shakespeare could never leave us with something that was merely bleak and cynical. There is always a dimension of humanity and tragedy; in this case it lies in the sincerity and trusting nature of Troilus, so desperate to believe in the fickle Cressida’s fidelity:

We two, that with so many thousand sighs

Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves

With the rude brevity and discharge of one.

Injurious time now with a robber’s haste

Crams his rich thievery up, he knows not how.

As many farewells as there be stars in heaven,

With distinct breath and consign’d kisses to them,

He fumbles up into a loose adieu,

And scants us with a single famish’d kiss,

Distasted with the salt of broken tears.

Such heartbreakingly beautiful poetry throws into sharp relief the cynicism and ugliness of the world around it.

I enjoyed working with Bogdanov. He was demanding, uncompromising, opinionated and very much the provocateur. His productions of Shrew and Romeo and Juliet at Stratford had caused great controversy as had his production of Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain at the National: one scene depicts a couple of Roman soldiers sodomising a young Celt—a fitting metaphor for imperialism. The prudish moral watchdog Mary Whitehouse brought a charge of obscenity against Bogdanov and he was threatened with prison. Peter Hall (director of the National) tactfully suggested, ‘Couldn’t you do it up the back in half-light?’ ‘No,’ Bogdanov insisted, ‘it’s got to be in full light down-stage centre.’ To his credit, Hall backed Bogdanov when the case came to trial at the Old Bailey in March 1982. Three days later the prosecution backed down and dropped the case.

Playing Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida was an enjoyable exercise. We weren’t being classical Greeks draped in sheets but a bunch of grotty old mercenaries in battered guerrilla uniforms squatting around our campfire. Ulysses has a couple of great set pieces, the first a hymn to the divine order of nature:

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts

In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

And make a sop of all this solid globe:

Strength should be lord of imbecility;

And the rude son should strike his father dead;

Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong.

Between whose endless jar justice resides—

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

But this is not a case of Shakespeare defending the Jacobean establishment, as is often supposed. It’s not Shakespeare but Ulysses talking, and his purpose is to ginger up the lethargic Greeks and make them see that Achilles, by defying the authority of Agamemnon, is sowing the seeds of mutiny among the ranks:

. . . The general’s disdain’d

By him one step below, he by the next,

The next by him beneath; so every step,

Exampl’d by the first pace that is sick

Of his superior, grows to an envious fever

Of pale and bloodless emulation.

Ulysses retains some of the qualities endowed on him by Homer: he is still the crafty, smooth-talking and hard-headed realist. He knows the Greeks can never win the war unless Achilles can be spurred on to face the Trojan hero Hector in single combat. To this end he beards Achilles in his den and suggests that the Greek commanders now idolise the blockhead Ajax because he is prominent in the field, whereas Achilles’ past triumphs are forgotten. His speech is a marvellous and very Shakespearean meditation on the ingratitude of Time, the transience of all worldly achievement and the fickleness of fashion. I will quote the speech in full because it is one of my top favourites and is well worth mulling over.

Where one might expect Ulysses to employ logic, reason or patriotism to appeal to Achilles, he resorts to a series of images—all concrete and emotive: the monster ingratitude stuffing good deeds into his backpack, the coat of mail rusting on the wall, the thousand sons of emulation pushing and shoving, then metamorphosing into a tidal wave, and so on. What could have been a dry rhetorical argument becomes instead a brilliant piece of devious emotional blackmail. Particularly affecting is the image of the gallant warhorse leading the charge, stumbling and being trampled by the poltroons who follow. Then the tone switches to humorous satire in the description of the fashionable host lightly dismissing his departing guest and, ‘with his arms outstretched as he would fly’, welcoming a new arrival. The array of disparate images is dazzling, entertaining and avoids any risk of portentousness:

Time hath, my lord,

A wallet at his back, wherein he puts

Alms for oblivion, a great-sized monster

Of ingratitudes. Those scraps are good deeds past,

Which are devoured as fast as they are made,

Forgot as soon as done. Perseverance, dear my lord,

Keeps honour bright. To have done is to hang

Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail

In monumental mock’ry. Take the instant way,

For honour travels in a strait so narrow,

Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path,

For emulation hath a thousand sons

That one by one pursue: if you give way,

Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,

Like to an entered tide they all rush by

And leave you hindmost;

Or, like a gallant horse fall’n in first rank,

Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,

O’errun and trampled on. Then what they do in present,

Though less than yours in past, must o’ertop yours.

For Time is like a fashionable host,

That slightly shakes his parting guest by th’ hand

And, with his arms outstretched as he would fly,

Grasps in the comer. Welcome ever smiles,

And Farewell goes out sighing. O let not virtue seek

Remuneration for the thing it was;

For beauty, wit,

High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,

Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all

To envious and calumniating Time.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,

That all with one consent praise new-born gauds,

Though they are made and moulded of things past,

And give to dust that is a little gilt

More laud than gilt o’er-dusted.

The present eye praises the present object.

Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,

That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax,

Since things in motion sooner catch the eye

Than what not stirs. The cry went once on thee,

And still it might, and yet it may again,

If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive

And case thy reputation in thy tent,

Whose glorious deeds but in these fields of late

Made emulous missions ’mongst the gods themselves,

And drove great Mars to faction.