Startling Reflection: Women of Troy at the Loft Theatre

Set directly after the fall of Troy, this tragedy follows the widowed queen Hecuba, her cursed daughter Cassandra, her bereaved daughter-in-law Andromache, and the hated Helen of Troy, the very cause of the war they have fallen victim to, as they each await their fates.The play reveals to us the horrific fates decided for these women by the triumphant Greeks, a largely unseen enemy, and we watch as each of them reckons with a future of torment. A highlight is the chorus of defeated women. They exist within a transitional space, stuck between their former lives of freedom and their futures of enslavement. Their unsettling hums underscore moments of tension, their songs retell the story of their city’s defeat, and their lamentation at each new tragic development creates a sense of communal grief. These women of a destroyed city sob for each other’s sorrows, united in anguish against a backdrop of ceaseless division.

Cunningham embodies maternal grief in her portrayal of this tragic figure, her tears making personal and tangible the otherwise apathetic cruelty of war.

The dethroned Trojan queen Hecuba is a central figure in the play, and Hannah Grainger Clemson plays her with a muted kind of acceptance. Hecuba seems to have acknowledged, even if she does not admit it, the reality of her situation. At one moment, she states: “We were so proud, but now we’ve come to nothing.” Unlike Hecuba in every way except her unescapable victimhood, is her maddened daughter Cassandra, played with wild conviction by Sage Woore. In a frenzy of laughter, wails and guttural screams, Woore communicates through unheeded prophecies the nuances of this famously wronged mythological figure. The emotional core of the performance, however, is Olivia Cunningham’s Andromache. Having already lost her husband Hector, this widow clutches her infant son Astyanax, appearing almost as if her embrace can protect the only male heir to the throne of her city from the wrath of the Greeks. Cunningham embodies maternal grief in her portrayal of this tragic figure, her tears making personal and tangible the otherwise apathetic cruelty of war.

Nobody is better to personify this cruelty than Menelaus, the husband of Troy’s captive Helen and one of the Greeks’ military leaders. This play’s Menelaus is commanding and oppressive, a harsh force of masculinity against the chorus of Trojan women, and Peter Daly-Dickson plays him with a blindingly modern sense of ‘toxic masculinity’. His lines, in a significant departure from the source material’s typical interpretation, is filled with profanity, contrasting the elevated speech of the women. When I asked writer and director David Fletcher why he chose to depict Menelaus with this anachronistic vulgarity, Fletcher explained: “He’s a very unpleasant man, so it didn’t seem right to me not to use a bit of strong language.” Moreover, the play’s most intense moment of conflict is the battle of words between Menelaus and Helen. Martha Allen-Smith is assertive and confident in the role, carrying a strong sense of defiant victimhood in the face of overwhelming blame and villainization. She declares: “I’ve lost my crown, and now I am condemned”. Separate from the otherwise allied female chorus, Helen demonstrates the power war has in driving its victims into conflict with one another.

We watch as numerous parallel Troys suffer siege before our very eyes.

After seeing Helen grapple in this way with the unanimous belief that the war was her fault, I asked director David Fletcher whether he felt Helen’s culpability was his to determine. “To argue, from a modern perspective, that it was all Helen’s fault is not good enough for me,” he explained, “but everybody in the play blames her, there’s no denying that.” At the end of our conversation, Fletcher reflected on the universal message of the tragedy: “The treatment of civilians and children in the play speaks so much for what’s going on in the world.”

Our own time is filled with its own choruses of war victims: entire civilizations brought to rubble, lovers bereaved by war, parents deprived of their children. We have our own Cassandras, calling out to us through headlines and phone screens with pleading portents for a terrible future they know is certain. We watch as numerous parallel Troys suffer siege before our very eyes. Perhaps then, a tragedy like Women of Troy is exactly the kind of startling reflection we need.

Tickets for Women of Troy, David Fletcher’s adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides, are available to under 25s for free during its run at the Loft theatre in Leamington Spa.