Women of Troy
Written by Euripides, translated by Jenny Green
Directed by Jenny Green and Robert Kennedy
A Hoi Barbaroi production
Played by Jeanette Cronin and Zoe Houghton
Belvoir St Downstairs Theatre, Surry Hills, Sydney
Until February 16
Tuesdays, 7pm; Wednesdays to Saturdays, 8.15pm; and Sundays, 5.15pm.
Tickets $25, $19 concession, "pay what can Tuesdays" (minimum $5)
Bookings (02) 9699 3444 or visit <http://www.belvoir.com>
REVIEW BY ALISON DELLIT
At the beginning of the program for Hoi Barbaroi's production of Euripides' Women of Troy is the statement: "This play is a protest against war in Iraq. Please find more information on how to actively oppose the war from the display in the [theatre] foyer."
On the back of the program is an advertisement for the February 16 "walk against the war" in Sydney.
First performed in 415 BC, Women of Troy has always been a passionate protest against war. Euripides was an Athenian playwright at a time when Athens was fighting the Peloponnesian War. The year before, Athens had attacked and subdued the tiny island of Melos. Punishing the Melians for refusing to surrender, Athens killed all the men and sold everyone else into slavery.
Euripides set his play in an encampment of women from a defeated city. The war happens to be the legendary Trojan War, but Euripides meant his audience of Athenians to identify with all victims of war, and that rings as true today as 2400 years ago.
It is a bleak play, as the women — Hecuba, played by Jeanette Cronin, and Cassandra, Andromache and Helen, all played by Zoe Houghton — struggle to comprehend, accept and deal with the collapse of their lives. In the Women of Troy, drama is generated largely by the emotion, particularly despair, felt by these women.
It is an intense play to be performed in the small intimate surrounds of Belvoir's Downstairs Theatre. It is carried off, however, by the compelling acting of both Cronin and Houghton.
Green and Kennedy have dressed their main actors in draped black cloth, reminiscent of the Islamic chador, and the music is Islamic prayer. The women's "conquerors" are Western soldiers and men in suits. The translation is wonderfully accessible.
This mechanism reminds the audience that the play's subject and themes are contemporary and that Iraqi women could suffer this fate. The play remains, however, the story of Troy and may be easier to follow after a quick read of the legend of the war.
The play is a piece of dramatic activism. Even the name of the company, Hoi Barbaroi, is taken from the derogatory Greek word for foreigner, suggesting an identification with those excluded from Western society.
In a statement distributed to the media, the play's directors explain: "We as a community are mistaken if we think naivety can protect us from complicity and guilt in the bloody devastation that will follow large scale military action [in Iraq]. We need to make audiences understand that those who will suffer as a direct consequence of our blindness and passivity don't have to be exactly the same as us to care for their future and extend to them our compassion."
Women of Troy is well worth seeing — a good night at the theatre, thought-provoking and compellingly acted. At a time of war, dramatists prepared to make a stand deserve our full support.
From Green Left Weekly, February 5, 2003.
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