November 29, 2007: Euripides, Women of Troy
National Theatre, Lyttelton. “From a version by Don Taylor.” 1 hr, 30 mins, no interval. Opened Lyttelton Theatre, November 28, 2007
We saw this, the second performance of this production, on what was evidently a schools night, to judge from the extraordinary crowd of late teen-age members of the audience. They were loud and somewhat boisterous, exhibiting a lot of excitement about actually seeing a play on the South Bank; and subdued yet comparatively boisterous after the curtain went down. But while the performance was going on they were as silent as the tomb.
And rightly so. Of all of Euripides’ somber dramas this one is surely the most somber and unrelenting. In an essay accompanying the program, Don Taylor, a prolific poet, playwright, TV director and adapter, who died in 2003 (his version of the play was first published in his The War Plays in 1990, the single play republished in 2007) explains the likely circumstances of then-current Greek political life to which Euripides was presumably reacting. They are appalling for the revelation of the barbarous cruelty of the Athenians. And yet they fade into insignificance in the face of the brutal facts of the play and its unsparing action.
In a sense, there is no real action to the play; it is all catastrophe, strung out at almost unendurable length. Hecuba, Queen of ruined Troy, her daughter Andromache and Andromache’s son Astyanax, the crazy Cassandra, and the women of her court (given individual names in the program, for reasons that remain obscure) are imprisoned in a warehouse-like holding area with a low ceiling, above which is another office-like space where Helen, alone, is being held; at stage left is a massive metal door that can be raised, revealing a large space that presumably leads onto a dock. It is a generalized, modern-day setting, suggestive perhaps of Sarajevo (Taylor’s poem “Reunion in Sarajevo” is included in the Methuen 2000 edition of the play as a “Postscript,” and in the National Theatre program as well). The women are dressed in dark-colored ball gowns, with bare shoulders, evidently to remind us of the elegant lives they have led — and have so recently had to forsake. And at times, quite unpredictably, they fall into almost somnambulatory dancing. I was reminded by this of the fact that the ancient Greek chorus sang and danced, and reminded also of how intimately and seamlessly Euripides blends ode and episode together to achieve a profoundly unified effect of emotional devastation.
Taylor’s version, as mounted by Katie Mitchell, the stage director, does away completely with the formal divisions of the text of the play; and yet one can sense segments of the action beginning and playing themselves out, and then in due course giving way to the next segment. This was especially evident in the segment involving the arrival of Menelaus, played as an almost simpering, spineless husband by Stephen Kennedy. He is angry beyond all bea