Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✭✭
by Euripides, translated by Nicholas Rudall,
directed by Marti Maraden
Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford
May 30-October 5, 2008
"Starry Cast Shines in Powerful Drama"
Euripides’ play “The Trojan Women” was first produced in 415bc. The strength of it, and the pity, is that it could have been written about today’s events. Director Marti Maraden demonstrates this in a production of great simplicity and beauty with a cast that simply couldn't be bettered.
The play, the third and only remaining part of a trilogy about the Trojan War, is an unconventional work even in the context of ancient Greek drama. It does not present the struggle between man and god or man and man but rather constitutes one long lament by those defeated in war for the injustice of fate and the inhumanity of war. Troy has fallen to the Greeks and its king, Priam, and all its heroes are dead. As the women of Troy, including Hecuba their queen, wait to learn their fate at the hands of the victors, they mourn what has happened and steel themselves for what is to come. Euripides structures the play by confronting the women with reports from the Greek herald Talthybius, each more terrifying than the last, concerning what will befall them. What is so chilling about the play is that the tactics used to humiliate those who already defeated are the same as those in use today--rape, slavery, killing of children, destruction of homes. An intermissionless hour and forty minutes of woe may seem depressing but in fact Euripides protest against the treatment of the people of Melos in his own day resonates so strongly now it helps to place our current events in context. Each atrocity the Trojan women must suffer also becomes a challenge to survive and to preserve the memory of what happened. The poetic prose of Welsh-born Nicholas Rudall’s 1999 translation makes the text even more immediate.
The Stratford Festival has assembled a one of the starriest casts ever seen in a single production--Stratford veterans Martha Henry, Seana McKenna and Joyce Campion; Shaw Festival veterans Nora McLellan, Kelli Fox, Trish Lindström, and Severn Thompson; and acclaimed Toronto actors Jane Spidell and Yanna McIntosh. It is worth attending the production just to see all these great Canadian actors together in the same play.
The play begins with the god Poseidon and the goddess Athena, former supporters of the Greeks, discussing how to punish them for their violation of of temples to the Greek gods in Troy. As we know from “The Odyssey”, Poseidon creates such a storm that it will take the Greeks ten years to return home. Designer John Pennoyer has dressed David W. Keeley as a modern admiral, is chest hung with innumerable medals, and fitted Nora McLellan in a tight white skirt suit with gold trim, making her look rather like Margaret Thatcher, both in blinding white, the only white to be seen in the play save for Cassandra, the priestess of Apollo. The voices of both deities drip with authority and anger and thus place the victory of the Greeks in an ironic context.
While the gods speak we notice downstage what seems to be a pile of rags. After the gods depart it slowly raises itself and we discover it is Hecuba. Martha Henry magisterially portrays her as a woman who has withstood trial after trial and who leads the lamentations as a kind of commemoration of what she and her compatriots have suffered. Sean Arbuckle plays Talthybius, the Greek herald in the unlucky position of having to relay the Greeks’ increasingly disconcerting messages to the women. He gives a very fine performance showing the strain of having to perform his unpleasant duty while inwardly empathizing with the women whom he wounds with his words. Given the context of the play, it is a key role since it shows that some Greeks do have a sense of humanity left if they could only listen to it rather than their lust for revenge.
The rest of the play focusses on the arrival of three important women who represent widely differing perspectives on the the women’s plight. The first is Cassandra in a truly chilling performance by Kelli Fox. Cassandra suffers from a blessing and a curse. Apollo gave her the gift of divine foreknowledge but when she did not return his love he cursed her so that she would never be believed. The women who regard Cassandra as mad are aghast to see her rejoicing in their downfall. She is to be Agamemnon’s mistress. What others see as a desecration of her virginity, she sees as the means through which Agamemnon and the entire house of Atreus will fall, as had been previously portrayed in Aeschylus “Oresteia” (458BC). What Fox gives is no conventional portrayal of madness since indeed Cassandra is not mad. Rather what Fox depicts in frightening detail is how the pressure of divine knowledge is too great for the human mind to bear. She knows the fates of everyone around her including herself and to calm herself has to try to force this knowledge into the background simply in order to live.
The next visitor is Andromache, wife of Troy’s great hero Hector, with their only son Astyanax. Andromache’s views are fully in tune with Hecuba’s and the other women. Her only consolation is that she will spend the rest of her life in slavery with her son, but the Greeks have determined that this is not to be. Seana McKenna gives a heartrending performance, one of her finest ever, as sorrow, anger and fear gradually turn toward bitter acceptance of the inevitable.
The final two visitors are a couple hated by the women above all others, Menelaus and his wife Helen. It is because of Helen that the Trojan War was fought. Priam’s son Paris was given her as a prize by the goddess of love Aphrodite, even though she was married to Menelaus. Menelaus used the Trojan’s theft of his wife as a pretext to unite the Greeks in military campaign to get her back, a campaign that lasted an unforeseen ten years. As Menelaus Brad Rudy is gruff and completely heedless of the waste of time and lives that his campaign has caused. As Helen, Yanna McIntosh gives a masterful performance that captures the fundamental ambiguity of this infamous woman. Contrary to what one might expect McIntosh plays Helen as both intellectually and physically seductive. She offers proofs that it is all the gods’ fault to exculpate herself and even as Menelaus vows to kill her upon their arrival back in Sparta, his rage seems more a struggle against her continuing attraction. McIntosh shows that Helen is born to be alluring even in spite of herself. She is such a mystery that even after this scene when Hecuba argues against all Helen has said, we still are not certain whether Helen did or did not go willingly with Paris.
Jane Spidell and Trish Lindström are the two leaders of the eight-woman chorus, absolutely precise in their choral speaking. One sequence that stands out is veteran actor Joyce Campion’s description of the fall of Troy, conjuring up in words more than any spectacle could show.
Except for two small benches the set is bare. Pennoyer has clad the chorus in kind of pants and head-wrappings that nomadic people wear even today all in earthen shades. The four principal women stand out in colour, Hecuba in blue, Cassandra in white, Andromache in black and Helen in red. Pennoyer gives the Greek guards the silhouette of ancient armour created however by modern close-cropped hair and crossed cartridge belts. Given the empty stage, lighting designer Michael J. Whitfield uses a wide array of techniques to create mood tempered with the decline of the day toward nightfall. In a wonderful effect when the chorus describes the arrival of the Greeks’ Trojan horse, the chorus mimes the hauling of the massive ropes while Whitfield creates a rectangle of light that glides from the upstage door onto the main stage. With such a superb cast and direction of such exquisite simplicity and depth, “The Trojan Women” is the undisputed “must-see” show of all the seven offerings of Stratford’s opening week.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Martha Henry as Hecuba and ensemble. ©David Hou.
2008-06-06
The Trojan Women