WOMEN OF TROY. To 27 February.
London.
WOMEN OF TROY
by Euripides from a version by Don Taylor.
Lyttelton Theatre In rep to 27 February 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 26, 29 Jan, 16, 20 Feb 2.15pm.
Audio-described 26 Jan 2.15pm, 28 Jan.
Captioned 19 Feb.
Runs 1hr 20min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7452 3000.
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 January.
Tragedy heightened by its mundane modern surrounds.
Director Katie Mitchell’s variable 20th-century setting builds a picture from Euripides’ picture of the defeated Trojan women that’s not confined by overtones of Iraq, though the explosions increasingly shaking the women’s factory holding-place could easily represent Baghdad’s Green Zone under fire.
Only as the final curtain descends, guillotine-like, amid explosive sounds is there overkill. Otherwise, Mitchell explores psychologies and power-relationships acutely, piecing them together through behavioural observation.
Euripides’ dialogue sometimes resists the modernity, his Chorus doesn’t fit easily and Cassandra’s unfocused, but this is heftily outweighed by an accumulation of telling detail. Like the restless waiting of women no longer in charge of their lives, their world now ending at doors systematically locked by men bearing bunches of keys.
And terror; all huddle in a corner when the Greek men arrive. As Menelaus pulls a mobile ‘phone from a jacket pocket, the women dive for the floor, expecting a weapon.
Mobiles make their point. Greek bureaucrat Talthybius walks in briskly with a zip-case speaking on his ‘phone, his day crammed with purpose, unlike theirs.
He’s only obeying orders, his briskness possibly an attempt to silence his conscience. Yet as the men psyche themselves up to snatch a baby for execution, he’s the one who grabs it. Taking it away, he fumbles for the right key to the door: comic detail and tragic circumstance in clashing irony.
Yet he takes care Andromache doesn’t bang her head and murmurs comfortingly as he perpetrates horrors. Menelaus, tough-talking Irishman, slowly reveals the weakness that lost him Helen. The Trojan women hate her, the cuckoo in their nest who caused their destruction. She’s upstairs in protective isolation, among the box-files but the women smash their way to her. Adept at blaming others, she’s finally seen dancing undressed with Menelaus, the one possible escapee.
Dancing, to a crackly forties wireless, the women attempt to formulate their restlessness, varied by rare stillness, protectively clasping hands or bruised arms. And there’s searing intensity as Kate Duchene’s Trojan Queen looks at the descended loading-bay door when her child’s been taken; like a puzzled, despairing mother-animal deprived of its offspring.
Hecuba: Kate Duchene.
Cassandra: Sinead Matthews.
Andromache: Anastasia Hille.
Talthybius: Michael Gould.
Sinon: Jonah Russell.
Menelaus: Stephen Kennedy.
Helen: Susie Trayling.
Chrysander: Mark Holgate.
Hippe: Rachel Clarke.
Illeana: Pandora Colin.
Macaria: Laura Elphinstone.
Thalia: Beth Fitzgerald.
Rhea: Helen Lymbery.
Pol;ycaste: Penelope McGhie.
Rhoda: Charlotte Roach.
Director: Katie Mitchell.
Designer: Bunny Christie.
Lighting: Paule Constable, Jon Clark.
Sound: Gareth Fry.
Music: Simon Allen.
Movement/Choreography: Struan Lesllie.
Costume: Vicki Mortimer.
Company voice work: Kate Godfrey.
2008-01-07 23:32:43