By Kathryn Neves
If you went into the Festival’s 2026 production of Troilus and Cressida expecting a straightforward Trojan War story, you were probably surprised.
Nestor, the oldest character, wears a soldier’s uniform from the 19th century. Ulysses takes inspiration from World War I. Agamemnon looks like he’s walked off the set of M.A.S.H., and Ajax was designed based on the A-Team and the Vietnam war. Helen acts as a World War II propaganda pin-up girl. Shakespeare’s “fool” of the play, Thersites, becomes a modern war correspondent—speaking truth and witnessing each horror.
Director Carolyn Howarth’s production is not really about the Trojan War. Nor is it about World War II, Vietnam, Korea, or any other modern conflict. While she updated the costumes and the setting, the truth is that USF’s Troilus and Cressida is bigger than any one war. Howarth’s production has taken time and place out of the equation entirely.
“This decision was based on the fact that our director was interested in commenting on the idea of war broadly, not on any singular conflict,” said Lezlie Cross, the dramaturg for Troilus and Cressida. “We didn’t want our (very smart) audiences to feel like we were commenting directly on a historical moment, but (like Shakespeare) making a bit of a pastiche of time periods that could transcend any one moment.”
Howarth’s Troilus and Cressida doesn’t explore one war, but all wars. By blending so many time periods, we see the questions that Shakespeare was really asking: why do we repeat this cycle of violence? Why do we glorify it?
Troilus and Cressida explores a tragic love story in the middle of a legendarily brutal war. In fact, it’s love that started the war in the first place. Menelaus loved Helen, Paris loved Helen, and the price of that love “launch’d above a thousand ships.” Throughout the play, Shakespeare keeps pulling at this thread. As Achilles battles Hector, as the walls of Troy sag under eight years of war, the naive Troilus and Cressida fall in love. These very human characters show us the cost of violence. What happens to love when it’s put under the pressure of war?
Troilus and Cressida has often been called a “problem play”—a play that isn’t quite comedy, isn’t quite tragedy and isn’t quite history. Although, as Howarth puts it, “I consider all of Shakespeare’s plays a ‘problem’ in that I have to figure out how to tell the story no matter what!” Troilus and Cressida, though, is one of Shakespeare’s trickiest plays. The tone veers wildly from tragedy to raucous comedy to a blockbuster action adventure. In fact, as Cross explains, the various original editions call it history, comedy, and tragedy. “Clearly they were confused too!”
The Festival’s production leans into the contradictory tone, becoming a satire. War, honor, heroes, courtly love—it’s all absurd. All of it, Shakespeare and Howarth tell us, is a fantasy. Nothing is sacred here; every Greek, Roman, and Elizabethan value is mercilessly mocked. It is, after all, one of Shakespeare’s most cynical plays (spoiler: the love story doesn’t work out too well!). Relationships fail, people die, wars go on for years and years. Shakespeare’s cynicism “feels uniquely current,” Cross said, “as we continually question our relationships, our leaders, our structures of power, and the role that violent conflict has in our society.”
Howarth’s production doesn’t give us any easy answers. Instead, it invites us to wrestle with these questions, to make our own meanings. As you’ll hear at the beginning of the play, and again at the end: “Like, or find fault; do as your pleasures are. Now, good or bad, ‘tis but the chance of war.”
