The Women of Troy by Euripides, adapted by Tom Wright and Barrie Kosky, directed by Barrie Kosky. Designed by Alice Babidge, lighting by Damien Cooper, musician Daryl Willis, sound design by David Gilfillan. With Robyn Nevin, Melita Jurisic, Arthur Dignam, Natalie Gamsu, Queenie van der Zandt, Jennifer Vuletic, Patricia Cotter and Kyle Rowling, Giorgios Tsamoudakis and William Larkin. Sydney Theatre Company presented by Malthouse Theatre, Merlyn Theatre, until November 22.
Sophocles is supposed to have remarked of Euripides that, while Sophocles portrayed men as they ought to be, Euripides showed them as they are. It’s an observation that goes to the heart of his drama. While Sophocles and Aeschylus wrote heroic tragedy, Euripides was concerned with the everyday: his characters were often the despised and marginalised, the women, children, slaves and functionaries caught in the unforgiving machinery of larger events. Euripides was, in fact, western drama’s first realist.
Yet even on Euripides’s terms, The Women of Troy is an odd play. For all the archaic beauty of the original text, it has an air of unsettlingly modernity. It’s a play of almost brutal simplicity that crystallises the traumatic shock of the aftermath of war. Originally part of a full-scale tragic trilogy that looked at different aspects of the war on Troy, The Women of Troy seems to have been a kind of coda, the final comment on the tumultuous events that preceded it. The other two plays are now lost, leaving us this fragment in which nothing happens because the worst already has.
The other thing to note about Euripides is that, for all his mythical framing, he was writing directly about contemporary events. When The Women of Troy was first performed, in 415BC, Athens was mired in the Peloponnesian Wars with Sparta and was about to launch its disastrous expedition to conquer Sicily, an invasion which ended with the humiliating defeat of Athens in 404BC. In the various conflicts, Euripides had ample opportunity to observe the cruelty with which each side treated its civilian captives: most commonly, the men were put to death and the women and children enslaved. Sometimes this happened to entire cities.
Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright’s adaptation highlights this realism, bringing Euripides’s steady gaze to bear on contemporary events. They’ve created a production which is probably as close as we can get to an experience of classical tragedy, which looks unblinkingly into catastrophe: from the beginning, its outcome is inevitable and unavoidable. It reveals that this is a play of our time as much as of Euripides, at once true to its ancient roots and opening up its contemporary aptness. And it’s bleak indeed: no chink of light pierces the darkness. The emotional effect is cumulative, and ultimately shattering. It’s extraordinary theatre.
This two-fold vision of the ancient and the contemporary is evident from the moment you enter the theatre and see that the auditorium is shaped like an amphitheatre. Every seat is draped in white; the fabric is reflective and has a weird effect on the fluorescent lighting, which is already alienating and harsh. We look down on a naked stage, which is dominated by a huge back wall constructed of old lockers, stacked like bricks up to the ceiling.
It begins with a figure draped in black and crowned in a tiara being pushed onto the stage on a flatbed trolley by a guard. The guard is wearing a white mask, like those worn by people who deal with corpses, which is subtly configured to look like the masks on Hoplite helmets worn by Greek soldiers. The woman – for we know at once it is a woman – is standing in the pose made famous through the photograph taken in Abu Ghraib, balancing precariously, her arms stretched out, trembling with strain, on either side. The guard (Kyle Rowling) takes a photograph with his mobile phone, and then begins to strip the woman’s finery – her rings, her bracelets, her necklace, her tiara – putting them in a clear plastic bag. He leaves her face draped, anonymous and blind, helpless, until he also takes her sumptuous dress.
At last she is revealed as Hecuba (Robyn Nevin), former Queen of Troy, standing in her shift on a cardboard box as ordered by the guard, her face bruised and bloodied, her hair shorn. Then the guard leaves and wheels in the other women, also cowled in black: also brutalised, anonymous, stripped of all civic rights as they are of their clothes. They are the theatrical image of what Giorgio Agamben called “naked life”, the “state of exception” that defines the sovereign power of the State.
What follows is the summary allocation of the women – in particular, Hecuba’s daughters – as spoils of war. Some have been distributed to the Greek soldiers by lot, some will be shot. The play simply consists of the women waiting to discover their fate, and finishes when we know what happens to each of them.
The adaptation hacks what is already a minimal play to its bones, hewing closely to its original dramaturgy. Tom Wright’s language is chillingly effective: utterly plain, with the weight of tragic necessity in every word. Basically, three things occur: Cassandra – the virgin cursed with second sight by Apollo after she refused his advances – is taken away and given to Agamemnon. The heavily pregnant Andromache, who enters with her son Astynax (Giorgios Tsmamoudakis or William Larkin) is sent to be the slave of Achilles, who killed her husband Hector, and finds that her small son is to be murdered. And Helen of Troy, whose abscondment with Paris started the whole thing, is given a short trial by Menelaus (Arthur Dignam) and Hecuba, and condemned. These three women are played by Melita Jurisic, making the play effectively a duet between Nevin and Jurisic.
This brutal reality is punctuated by singing, a diverse range of music which includes Dowland, Mozart, Bizet and Slovenien folk songs. The music is a lament for everything that the action of the play denies and destroys – love, beauty, harmony – and is the single human expression remaining to the women.
As in conventional Greek tragedy, the violence occurs off-stage, a most effective means of engendering imagination. We hear off-stage screaming and gunshots, and we see the fear before it and the effect afterwards – most desolately when the half mad Cassandra is raped in one of the lockers by the guard and returns, her bloodstained pants around her ankles, hobbling and violated, babbling incoherently of her marriage to Agamemnon, or when the blood-drenched corpse of the little boy is carried onto the stage.
This production is particularly effective in how it exploits the banality of atrocity. One aspect of torture is how it transforms ordinary objects, even household items, into instruments of pain. Here there is a rather grim moment when the guard walks across the stage, fiddles in a tool box and returns with a huge awl. We have no idea what he is going to use it for, and don’t want to imagine. When the women are allocated, they are put in cardboard boxes which are sealed with masking tape and wheeled off, reinforcing their dehumanised status as cargo, mere trophies of war whose identities are not only erased but irrelevant.
What carries the grief and crushing inevitability of the horror enfolding these women is the performances. As Hecuba, an old woman witnessing the destruction of her life, Nevin is the lynchpin of the play: she is present on stage all through, and she is the medium through which we experience the tragedy. This is an unmissable performance: that voice vibrates in your bones, raging, lamenting, sorrowful, utterly broken and defeated and yet stubbornly refusing to be demeaned, even in this ultimate degradation. Melita Jurisic in her three roles is a brilliant foil, the hysteric counterpoint to Nevin’s stoic refusals.
Perhaps what is most impressive about this production is its refusal to reach for easy theatrical manipulations. The contemporary allusions are never gratuitous: rather, they emerge as inevitable aspects of the reality this play is revealing. It’s heartbreaking, but Kosky’s restraint means that the effect goes deeper than tears. His directorial tact represents the reality of war without cheaply exploiting it: this seems to me to be a production of exemplary honesty, that openly and without showiness acknowledges its own artifice and by doing so reinforces the horrific realities behind it. It’s a cry of grief, a keening, that resonates in its own present and then leaves us to deal with the aftermath. Because the worst part about it is that you know that it’s true.
Picture: Melita Jurisic as Helen and Robyn Nevin as Hecuba in The Women of Troy. Photo: Tracey Schramm
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