BWW Reviews: AFTER TROY, Shaw Theatre, March 2011

Kaite Welsh

Abandoned by their gods, their city in ruins, the women of Troy await their destiny as prisoners of the Greek army. Glyn Maxwell has drawn from two of Euripides' tragedies, The Trojan Women and Hecuba, to produce a stunning new play that is at times darkly funny, at others horrifying.

The action shifts from the cave where the women are incarcerated to the camp of the Greek army, and both parties are treated with sympathy, thanks in particular to Owen Pearce's Talthybius, a civil servant with a poet's soul who transcribes the decisions of his superiors and acts as their mouthpiece, and Iain Batchelor, endearingly gauche as Kratos, the women's guard. Nicholas Tennant initially plays the unctuous Mestor for laughs, but it quickly becomes apparent that this buffoon of an ally has his own agenda - next to Agamemnon's bitter guilt, his frantic self-justification is hard to stomach, and even the gory tragedy of his comeuppance feels defensible.

Maxwell doesn't flinch away from portraying the harsh realities of war for women, but at no point does it seem gratuitous. Especially effective is Eve Matheson's portrayal of Hecuba when the women are divided up between the army along with the rest of the spoils. From clinging hopelessly to her former title in the first act, she abandons all sense of self as Odysseus' property, calling herself simply ‘O' after the letter crudely daubed on her dress.

Hannah Barrie's Andromache is the closest thing the production has to a weak link - her performance at times seems overplayed - but the overall impression is of a woman locked inside her private grief, who neither wants nor needs the audience's sympathy. Amy Noble gives a star performance as Polyxena, who fell in love with the enemy soldier Achilles and takes a masochistic joy in the news that she is to be sacrificed on his tomb in a twisted wedding ceremony.

However, the night belongs to both Matheson and Antony Byrne, whose blazing performance as the bellicose Agamemnon is by turns funny and desperately sad. Still raw with grief from the death of his daughter, his blistering anger mingles with a reluctant interest in the Trojan women, particularly Hecuba who he remembers from their former life, and he finds an uneasy kinship in Rebecca Smith Williams' Cassandra, the mad prophetess who skulks around the edges of the stage like a shadow.

It takes guts to not simply translate a Euripides play but re-tell it. Maxwell, easily the best dramatic poet this country has produced in recent years, has proved to be more than up for the challenge.

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