Women of Troy

Published Thursday 29 November 2007 at 17:05 by Jason Best

Euripides’ great anti-war play was timely when it was first performed in 415BC and it is no less timely today. Written in the shadow of a contemporary atrocity in which the Athenians slaughtered the men of the island of Melos and enslaved the women, the play remains a harrowing representation of warfare’s collateral damage.

Katie Mitchell’s new production is set in the grim, concrete offices of a ferry terminal, where the women of Troy wait to be shipped off into slavery, while minor functionaries of the Greek war machine bustle about with clipboards, performing the bureaucratic tasks of occupation.

The Trojan women wear elegant evening gowns, but it’s clear in Mitchell’s staging that their spirits have been shredded by the horrors they have been through. Kate Duchene’s regal Hecuba, her voice scratchy and strained, gives the sense of someone who has been so scoured by grief that she is now simply going through the motions of living. Sinead Matthews’ manic depressive Cassandra hysterically strips her clothes, and Anastasia Hille’s Andromache, whose baby son is torn from her arms to be murdered, rushes about the space in a frenzy.

Mitchell’s depiction of these damaged women reveals sharp psychological insight, but she can’t resist shifting back and forth in this production between shrewdly observed naturalism and her trademark stylisation. Those who saw her recent Glyndebourne production of Bach’s St Matthew Passion will be familiar with her tendency to break the action with outbursts of ballroom dancing or the ritual pouring of salt.

The snatches of big band music or Burt Bacharach are another distraction, but the rest of the production’s soundscape is highly effective, with the intimidating noise of clanging and clanking machinery punctuating passages of ambient electronica. Every now and then, the sound of a ship’s horn comes as a chilling reminder of the women’s terrible fate.