Renowned as a problem play due to its tangled ambiguities and a storyline that cries out for a catharsis, "Troilus and Cressida" is among the most rarely staged of William Shakespeare's 37 plays.
In Japan, other than Yukio Ninagawa's all-male 2012 production, whose spectacular and muscular battle scenes ensured sell-out audiences dominated by young women, you could count on the fingers of one hand all the other major stagings here, ever.
With the situation the same the world over, performances of this verse-drama from 1602 hardly figure in theater history, unlike many of the Bard's plays such as "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Hamlet" — his longest work, written just before "Troilus and Cressida" — or "King Lear."