(The author is not a member of the CRIMSON. He is a senior associated with Leverett House. He travelled to England last summer and there observed the RSC.)

The Aldwych is one of the harder theatres in London to get to: if you go by underground, you get off at Holborn and walk a very long block down to the Stand. This is its only disadvantage, however, and counterbalancing that is one overpowering merit: the Aldwych is the London home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Perhaps the most salient comment about this group is expressed on the back of every RSC program: "The company is responsible for most of the major Shakespeare productions seen in this country." And one might add, most of the major Shakespeare productions seen in the world.

Last summer the Aldwych produced, among other things, Troilus and Cressida. Troilus and Cressida is supposed to be a "problem play"; indeed, after having tried recently to produce it at the Loch, Dan Seltzer threw up his hands and swore never again to get involved with it.

Professor Seltzer begins his introduction to the American Signet edition of the play, "The modern student of Troilus and Cressida -reader, spectator, and actor-is faced with complex problems of staging, character, and moral ideas." One suspects he wrote this before his attempted production; at any rate, its truth cannot be faulted.

The RSC, to avoid superfluities and thrust directly to the play's center, presented a bare stage and Greeks and Trojans in loincloths. For a number of the players this no doubt meant some fairly regular workouts in the company gym. But, if in externals the production was sparse simplicity, in its emotional effect it pounded home a message-pounded it home with a sledge-hammer heaviness, until the greater part of the audience looked wearily up from holes in the floor, and a number of old ladies had left.

No doubt any play which singles out for condemnation war and debasement of love is highly topical. As Seltber says, the play is complex, but it is still fair to call it an indictment of "wars and lechery."

Thirsites, the deformed, caviling, ranting, smirking, groveling Greek, gradually emerges as the dominant figure. Ajax beats him, Patroclus upbraids him, but when (as he watches while Cressida submits to Diomed's advances) he speaks the line:

How the Devil Luxury, with his fat rump and potato finger, tickles these together. Fry, lechery, fry! his force is irresistible.

Thirsites' cynical viewpoint remains consistently the same, and the structure of the play as it evolves becomes more and more an argument for support of his overview. Shakespeare gives the last lines of the play to Pandarus, who refers to the time when he will make out his will:

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

And at that time bequeath you my diseases.

These lines represent precisely Thirsites' bitterness, and the director, John Barton, took notice of this by bringing both to the footlights. The two romped in acrid triumph.

Two symbols were hoisted to the play's masthead to further the effectiveness of the play. The first, a bull's head, was huge, elegant, and topped by two unmistakably symbolic horns. Whatever its mythological associations or its connotations of potency, it caught aptly the implications of Menelaus's and Troilus's cuckoldry.

The second was a kind of prosthetic phallus which belonged to Thirsites. When fastened to his loincloth it was visible only when he turned upstage, and its curves were those of a snake. Released, and it was left hanging a good deal of the time, it hung to his knees. Insofar as it did not allow him the modesty allowed to those around him, it gave him a reason for his cynicism. Insofar as, when it was it was present, the full dramatic force of the play swung on its axis, it gave Thirsites immediately the authority which on the page he achieves only in the last act.

The "problem" of inconsistency of character, which arises particularly in Cressida's and Pandarus' case, was dealt with by Barton in sexual terms. Cressida was initially innocent yet boundlessly lustful, and her night with Troilus initiated her into a physicality which dictated her subsequent falseness. Pandarus was a glib, leering yet friendly uncle, whose skill in sexual innuendo helped him to live a vicarious sexual life through those around him.