by Euripedes
Translated by Nicholas Rudall
Directed by Marti Maraden
At the Tom Patterson Theatre
May 14-October 5, 2008

    To the victors go the spoils and to the losers go atrocities and pain. So it has ever been for innumerable centuries and so it is in Euripedes’ The Trojan Women, which begins after Troy has been sacked by the Greeks. Old Hecuba, widow of King Priam of Troy, is compelled to be a voyeur to the suffering of her people, especially the women such as beautiful Andromache, her daughter-in-law, who has her very young son torn from her and thrown off a rocky cliff in an act of cold-blooded murder decreed by the Greeks. Of course, the actual murder is not represented on stage; what we see are Andromache’s despair and grief that tunnel into her very soul. Then there’s Cassandra, Hecuba’s daughter, who is driven to frenzied prophecy and madness before she is led away to become a concubine to Greek general, Agamemnon. Under the decree of Fate, men rule and the women of Troy suffer, though one of them—Helen, Menelaus’ wife who was the cause of the ten-year old war—is able to use her sexual seductiveness and clever mind to plead and charm her way out of death by stoning. In Marti Maraden’s uneven but moving production, she is surrounded by bedraggled Trojan women who mark her entrance and exit by audible hissing. It’s not just to show their hatred of her; the hissing suggests she’s a snake who has poisoned their world.

   Euripedes was a realist even though he followed theatrical conventions of his time by using the unities of time, place, and action, and a chorus (a singing one, when required) whose chief business is to comment with stylized feeling on unfolding episodes. In this production, the chorus is a mixed success, just like the colloquially sinewy English translation by Nicholas Rudall and the production on the whole. Against John Pennoyer’s set that has a rusted metal look, all jagged and broken, the women (dressed in rags that resemble lichen or weeds) are led strongly by Joyce Campion, Severn Thompson, and Jane Spidell, though they are given incongruously sugary songs that don’t sound even remotely Greek. Their director does even worse with the deities Poseidon and Athena, opting to turn them into Second World War naval types (and accoutred as such by John Pennoyer who mixes the modern with the ancient in his overall design, especially for the Greeks). True, the deities are unhappy about the way things have transpired—particularly the fact that the Greeks haven’t paid them the proper respect by way of sacrifice—but they are classic gods, not simply tetchy or volatile commanders of ships and navies. They may not really care about the effects of their commands on humans, but they are divinities. Here, they don’t sound or look like divinities, and are certainly not given any due elevation, especially not by Pennoyer’s low gangway on which they are mounted.

   So, the mythological aspect is vulgarized, but the production does compensate for this defect by a good performance by Sean Arbuckle as the humane Greek herald Talthybius, and by four other excellent performances. Martha Henry as Hecuba gives her best Stratford performance in over a decade—and the first one I have liked in that time span. Her old Hecuba, unsteady on her feet though not in mind, is almost beaten down by waves of grief. Her lamentations ring out with a sense of desolation, and it is only when she gets to denounce Helen that she changes register for a prosaic realism that turns her into a sort of contemporary prosecutor. This is when her performance loses power, its rhetorical discursiveness prevailing against any sense of authentic emotion. However, its irony prevents a total flattening.

   Yanna McIntosh is strikingly bold as Helen, combining the character’s sexiness with intellectual cunning and resourcefulness. The best performances come from Kelli Fox and Seana McKenna. Ms. Fox’s Cassandra has that rare sense of danger that marks a first-rate, unpredictable performer, and her extraordinary physical presence and vocal suppleness make for a wonderfully vivid characterization, unsettling and moving. Ms. McKenna’s Andromache is heart-wrenching, whether cursing Helen while trying to compose herself to bid farewell to her little boy or actually saying her goodbye to him. Her outcry as she is wheeled away is an unforgettable theatrical experience. Everything else that is left becomes anti-climax, even Hecuba’s final lament as Troy goes up in flames—a pyrotechnical moment that is created in a surprisingly tame manner.     

Photos: David Hou

pic 1: Martha Henry as Hecuba and Seana McKenna as Andromache

pic 2: Martha Henry as Hecuba and Kelli Fox as Cassandra





Go Back to: Stage Reviews