The Women of Troy
Nov. 19th, 2008 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shamoSaw it tonight and then walked a long way home in the rain....
In short it was hit and miss, but when it hit it hit hard and it hit well.
The play is set in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War, and tells the story of how the Trojan women are divided up as spoils among the greek victors.
The set was built of lockers (I mean school lockers), and spattered with blood. It was all very industrial and very stark. Echoes of Abu Graib, Guantanamo or any such 'compound' (what a word - compound yeah..). I don't know what the stage area was. A yard? A place to execute the prisoners?
Enter Hecuba, queen of troy. Wheeled, with her crown and robes on. Sack over her head. The 'attendant' wearing a Hanibal Lector-esque mask, wheeling her out then set her up, and took a photo with his mobile phone. These attendants appeared time and time again. Brutalising the women, shipping them about, and putting them in boxes to be loaded onto the Greek ships. A theme that recurred through the show, and it worked really well. Hecuba was then stripped of her rainment, which was put in little plastic bags like in a prison, And left standing shivering in her underwear. This idea of the women being treated as cargo - as objects and as spoils of war and as subjects for mobile phone pictures came across strongly again and again. And it was very effective.
Hecuba was the star of the show - and she was the highlight. She was accompanied by a chorus of 3 women, who sung (their songs ranged from Louis Armstrong to Slovenian folk music) intermittently, often against the sound of gunshots ringing out off stage. 1 woman played Kassandra, Andromache and Helen. Menelaus was the only other speaking character aside from Talthybius - who was never on stage but whose voice came through a speaker suspended from the ceiling. He was dispassionate and unsympathetic - nothing like the Talthybius of Euripides' play...
And here's where we hit the issues. I think this production would have benefited from breaking from the text entirely and concentrating on the message it was trying to put across. A message about brutality, and what happens to captives and captors - the powerless and the powerful - with the Trojan War as the backdrop. The moments of actual text were the weakest. Actors were over-stylised, static and very 'serious' when these moments occurred, and it just didn't mesh with the production. Hecuba's most effective monologues were her arias.
The relationships between Hecuba and the other women were also awkward. Kassandra was too 'Look at me I'm so crazy sooooo crazy did I mention I'm crazy....! Ha ha! crazy!' (made me think if Lisa's Ophelia from the Simpsons), and as a result she was unclear. She was brutalised and she was broken, yes - but she was also (apparently) delivering text - which in this show became superfluous. The pattern was kind of maintained. Andromache was pregnant in this production. "Gothic Pregnant Andromache" as Helen dubbed her. I think this was done entirely to set up a punch to the stomach she received from the guards at one point. And then Helen seemed to be coked up (or something - she was high I'm sure of it) and kind of helpless - I think the whole scene would have been more interesting if she'd had higher status, especially with Menelaus.
So yes - issues around the text, and a couple of bits of brutality that I think were a bit gratuitous and non-essential to the play. But as mentioned when it did hit, it hit hard.
Oh and Menelaus looked like Grand Moff Tarkin from Star Wars Episode 4. And he was in a wheel chair. It was cool.
In short it was hit and miss, but when it hit it hit hard and it hit well.
The play is set in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War, and tells the story of how the Trojan women are divided up as spoils among the greek victors.
The set was built of lockers (I mean school lockers), and spattered with blood. It was all very industrial and very stark. Echoes of Abu Graib, Guantanamo or any such 'compound' (what a word - compound yeah..). I don't know what the stage area was. A yard? A place to execute the prisoners?
Enter Hecuba, queen of troy. Wheeled, with her crown and robes on. Sack over her head. The 'attendant' wearing a Hanibal Lector-esque mask, wheeling her out then set her up, and took a photo with his mobile phone. These attendants appeared time and time again. Brutalising the women, shipping them about, and putting them in boxes to be loaded onto the Greek ships. A theme that recurred through the show, and it worked really well. Hecuba was then stripped of her rainment, which was put in little plastic bags like in a prison, And left standing shivering in her underwear. This idea of the women being treated as cargo - as objects and as spoils of war and as subjects for mobile phone pictures came across strongly again and again. And it was very effective.
Hecuba was the star of the show - and she was the highlight. She was accompanied by a chorus of 3 women, who sung (their songs ranged from Louis Armstrong to Slovenian folk music) intermittently, often against the sound of gunshots ringing out off stage. 1 woman played Kassandra, Andromache and Helen. Menelaus was the only other speaking character aside from Talthybius - who was never on stage but whose voice came through a speaker suspended from the ceiling. He was dispassionate and unsympathetic - nothing like the Talthybius of Euripides' play...
And here's where we hit the issues. I think this production would have benefited from breaking from the text entirely and concentrating on the message it was trying to put across. A message about brutality, and what happens to captives and captors - the powerless and the powerful - with the Trojan War as the backdrop. The moments of actual text were the weakest. Actors were over-stylised, static and very 'serious' when these moments occurred, and it just didn't mesh with the production. Hecuba's most effective monologues were her arias.
The relationships between Hecuba and the other women were also awkward. Kassandra was too 'Look at me I'm so crazy sooooo crazy did I mention I'm crazy....! Ha ha! crazy!' (made me think if Lisa's Ophelia from the Simpsons), and as a result she was unclear. She was brutalised and she was broken, yes - but she was also (apparently) delivering text - which in this show became superfluous. The pattern was kind of maintained. Andromache was pregnant in this production. "Gothic Pregnant Andromache" as Helen dubbed her. I think this was done entirely to set up a punch to the stomach she received from the guards at one point. And then Helen seemed to be coked up (or something - she was high I'm sure of it) and kind of helpless - I think the whole scene would have been more interesting if she'd had higher status, especially with Menelaus.
So yes - issues around the text, and a couple of bits of brutality that I think were a bit gratuitous and non-essential to the play. But as mentioned when it did hit, it hit hard.
Oh and Menelaus looked like Grand Moff Tarkin from Star Wars Episode 4. And he was in a wheel chair. It was cool.
