✭✭✭✭✩

by William Shakespeare, directed by James Wallis

Shakespeare BASH’d, The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen Street West, Toronto

January 29-February 8, 2026

Thersites: “Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion” (Act 5, Scene 2)

Troilus and Cressida is generally considered one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays. It assumes a knowledge of Homer’s Iliad and its tone constantly shifts among the modes of comedy, tragedy and satire. The result is that it is seldom produced in North America. The Stratford Festival, for instance, has staged the play only three times since its founding in 1953, the last time in 2003. In contrast, the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon has staged it 11 times between 1960 and 2018. In England, artistic directors look upon the play as a challenge, whereas in North America artistic directors see it as a liability. Luckily for us in Toronto, Shakespeare BASH’d has taken the British view and has created the clearest, most insightful staging of the five productions I have seen. It reveals in T&C a very different mood from all of Shakespeare’s other plays, a mood that resonates strongly with the precarious times in which we live.

One reason that T&C feels so relevant is that its principal subject is betrayal – not merely betrayal by one person of another, but the betrayal of values once held sacred. It is a play that asks whether any ideals, like true love, can survive in a world where all other ideals have been corrupted.

People may think that Homer’s Illiad celebrates heroism and war because it is an epic, but one reason why the work is so great is that it does the exact opposite. Do the Greeks have a just cause for launching a ten-year-long war against Troy? The goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite had a contest to decide who was the most beautiful. They decided to have Paris of Troy be the judge. Aphrodite, goddess of love, told Paris that if he chose her, she would give him the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose Aphrodite and she gave him Helen, the main problem being that Helen was already married to Menelaus. Paris fled with Helen to his home city of Troy. This cause the Greeks to think it was their duty to retrieve Helen and punish Troy for its insolence in harbouring her.

Given that Paris’s “rape” of Helen was caused by the gods, not by man, Homer shows that the Greeks’ justification for war is extremely dubious. As Shakespeare has Troilus exclaim, “Fools on both sides! Helen must needs be fair / When with your blood you daily paint her thus”.

At the start of the play there is a truce between Greece and Troy after seven years of fighting because the Greeks are unable to persuade their greatest warrior, Achilles, to leave his tent and join the battle. Director James Wallis makes clearer than in previous productions I’ve seen how Shakespeare has structured the first part of the by paralleling scenes among the Trojans with scenes among the Greeks. In the Trojan scenes we see that Troilus has fallen in love with Cressida and has asked her uncle Pandarus to act as go-between. In the Greek scenes, we see the Greeks debating how to rouse Achilles to action.

Ulysses, the smartest and wiliest of the Greeks conceives of a plan to lure Achilles back into the field. Instead of cajoling him, Ulysses says the Greeks should pointedly ignore him to pique his vanity. A one-on-one contest with the Trojan hero Hector has been proposed if the Greeks can choose their representative. Ulysses counsels choosing the strong but dumb Ajax over Achilles to irk Achilles even more.

Shakespeare parallels the theme of love in the Trojan scenes with the theme of war in the Greek scenes. He presents Troilus wooing of Cressida via Pandarus on one side and the Greeks wooing of Achilles via Ulysses on the other. Only the wooing of Cressida is successful, but the lives of both Achilles and Cressida are affected by betrayals of different kinds. Achilles tells Patroclus, who has been his lover, that his first priority is to marry the Trojan princess that Queen Hecuba of Troy has chosen. We also learn that Calchas, a Trojan priest who has defected to the Greeks, offers to trade the Greeks’ captive, the Trojan Antenor, for Calchas’s daughter Cressida. Cressida has no desire to join her traitorous father, yet she is forced to become a political pawn.

The Greek Diomedes is chosen as her guardian. But when she reaches the Greek camp, the Greek leaders insist on kissing her, a cringeworthy scene that looks like a more polite form of gang-rape. Soon enough we see that just as her father betrayed Troy, Cressida betrays Troilus . Troilus sees her kissing Diomedes and giving him the love-token he gave her. In a further irony, the Greeks, who are fighting to take Helen from a foreign land back to Greece, have no trouble in taking possession of the foreign princess Cressida in their own camp.

As it happens, what finally draws Achilles into battle is not defending the Greeks’ honour but revenge for the death of his lover Patroclus at the hands of Hector. Achilles fights Hector but does not win. Instead, he sends his private army of Myrmidons to murder Hector, a betrayal of any code of honour. Achilles then drags Hector’s body around the walls of Troy, a desecration that betrays any notion of heroism.

What makes the Shakespeare BASH’d production superior to all the others I’ve seen is how clearly director James Wallis has understood this underlying structure of the play. Previous directors have been too caught up in depicting the decadence of the Greeks, particularly of Achilles and Patroclus, and of the Trojans, particularly of Paris and Helen, to grasp the themes and structure that hold together what can otherwise seem like a overly diffuse story.

A further plus is that Wallis has communicated his understanding of the play to entire cast. Too often, especially with Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival, actors speak their lines but are unconvincing since they seem not to understand precisely what their speeches means. In T&C, as in other productions by Shakespeare BASH’d, this never is the case. I learned much more about how the personal and martial politics of the play work from this production because every member of the cast was so clear about the importance of every speech.

A 15-member cast play 23 named roles. Of these there are many standouts. Real-life couple Deivan Steele and Breanne Tice play the title characters. Too often Troilus and Cressida are portrayed as simply a stereotypical example of young love. Here, Steele and Tice portray the characters as much more complex. Steele shows Troilus as an idealist in more than love. Although Troilus says that Helen is not worth all the blood that has been spilled for her sake, he also says the Trojans would lose their honour if they did not defend her. Steele masterfully portrays Troilus’s complex mixture of anger, sadness and despair when he sees Cressida betray him with Diomedes.

Cressida is too often depicted as a light-headed creature unworthy of Troilus’s attention. Tice’s performance is much more nuanced. Tice shows Cressida is acutely aware that she is at a disadvantage being a woman in a man’s world. She resents being regarded as a piece of merchandise as Pandarus treats her. She says she wishes that “we women had men’s privilege / Of speaking first”. She also knows that men and women’s desires are different. As she notes, “Men prize the thing ungained more than it is”, with the implication that once the object is gained it is less prized.

Wallis gives Tice’s intelligent Cressida a strong reason for deserting Troilus that others have not emphasized as clearly. Wallis makes the Greeks’ kissing scene welcoming Cressida so unpleasant and Cressida’s repugnance so evident, that we can understand that Cressida sees she needs to belong to one man simply to prevent the Greeks from thinking she belongs to all of them. If Diomedes loves her, he is the most obvious candidate for her protector, even though Tice shows that granting him that status after swearing fidelity to Troilus is a struggle. Wallis’s and Tice’s approach goes a long way to solving one of the main puzzles of the play by giving Cressida believable grounds for betraying Troilus.

The award for the best-spoken performance in the production goes to Jennifer Działoszynski as Ulysses. Działoszynski gives an exquisite account of Ulysses’ great speech about “degree” in Act 1, Scene 3, ll. 79-141 that emphasizes the importance of order in all things. It is a speech that elucidates Shakespeare’s world not only in this play but in all of his plays and, indeed, is key in understanding the Elizabethan world-view in general. Działoszynski expounds Ulysses’ arguments with such clarity that it is as if Shakespeare finally decided to uncover the very basis of his thought. The irony, of course, is that T&C is a perfect example of what Ulysses warns will happen when order is not followed. In that state of discord, “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”. It is chilling how relevant Ulysses’ analysis is to current events. Działoszynski brings a keen understanding of the text to all her lines and makes Ulysses our one trustworthy guide of reason through the moral quagmire of the action.

Shakespeare provides the play with two characters whose primary role is to comment on the action. Geoffrey Armour gives us a gleefully decadent Trojan, Pandarus, who seems to think that sex is the only true motive for human interactions. In contrast, the cynical Greek Thersites takes aim particularly at any attempt of the Greeks to believe they fight for a noble cause. Julia Nish-Lapidus revels in the role which gives her a chance to hurl some of the most extensive lists of insults of any character in Shakespeare.

Among the other players, Andrew Iles reveals Achilles as extraordinarily self-regarding and as petulant as he is savage. Shakespeare makes us wonder what it means that Achilles, the Greeks’ most prized warrior, is also the least noble and the least honourable. Felix Beauchamp plays four roles including that of Patroclus, Achilles’ lover. His finest moment comes when Achilles tells Patroclus that his betrothal to Hecuba’s daughter is more important to him that anything else: “Fall, Greeks; fail, fame; honour, or go or stay; / My major vow lies here; this I’ll obey”. Beauchamp says nothing, but the look he gives combines so much pain and anger we know exactly what he is thinking.

As Agamemnon, Isaiah Kolundzic wields a resonant voice full of authority, shading sometimes into bluster. In contrast, Adriano Reis plays Ajax as the main object of comedy in the play – as gifted in physical strength as he is lacking in brain-power. Jordin Hall’s portrayal of Hector shows the Trojan’s prime warrior to be just the opposite of the Greeks’ unprincipled Achilles. When Hector fights Ajax and realizes that he and Ajax are distant cousins, Hector calls off the battle since he feels that ties of blood should be stronger than allegiance to nations. Kate Martin well distinguishes the sultry Helen, who here also serves as the play’s Prologue, from the mentally disturbed Cassandra, cursed with seeing the future but never being believed. Martin plays Cassandra’s prophetic outbursts as sudden fits from which she has to be soothed and calmed.

Troilus and Cressida is so seldom performed in North America that fans of Shakespeare should not hesitate to see it. Yet, when such a supposedly “difficult” play is given so thoroughly insightful a production as this, it becomes a must-see for all serious theatre-lovers. Wallis shows that Troilus and Cressida reveals a deeply cynical side of Shakespeare unseen in his best-known plays. It shows us a world where hypocrisy is so obvious that it would be comic if only it did not have such deadly consequences. That makes the play so relevant that it feels as if Shakespeare is writing less about a legendary war but about today’s events.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Breanne Tice as Cressida and Deivan Steele as Troilus with Geoffrey Armour as Pandarus in background; Andrew Iles as Achilles; Jordin Hall as Hector with Andrew Iles as Achilles in background; Breanne Tice as Cressida and Deivan Steele as Troilus; Geoffrey Armour as Pandarus. © 2026 Matt Nish-Lapidus.

For tickets visit: theatrecentre.org.