No joy in Troy
The grief suffered by The Women of Troy is huge: city destroyed, husbands and children murdered, friends raped by the triumphant Greeks. Yet Katie Mitchell’s production fails to deliver the horror and pathos that this should inspire.
Her women are locked in a prison which looks like an underground carpark with cafeteria tables, dressed in cocktail dresses and fumbling futilely with make-up bags and lipsticks, evidently plucked out of a much more salubrious setting. The gap between the high life and rock bottom is a perfect place from which to mine the power of despair.
But Mitchell’s decision to stylise the misery and despair of the women means this opportunity is lost. The chorus of women are reduced to representations of hysteria. They twitch and moan in regular patterns, twirl fabric around fingers, eyes wide with horror, twittering between themselves: a collection of sterotypes of psychological trauma.
It is an annoying way to present collective hysteria and shock; but, more importantly, it means that when their tragedies pile up, it’s more of a body count rather than a examination of human suffering.
There are moments of beauty. The women drift into ballroom dancing, a ghostly evocation of their previous existence. There is a particularly impressive scene where one of the women performs a grotesque parody of the dance, her limbs jerking around in death throes, like a broken string puppet.
And there are a couple of scenes when convincing feeling seeps through the surface. When Andromache reveals the news to Hecuba that her daughter is dead, it is a quieter and more powerful examination of unbearable grief.
However, it is outnumbered by shouty scenes: the crazed and shrieky Cassandra being carted off to be married to Agamemnon, setting fire to dustbins and stripping off. The debate between between Clytemnestra and Helen is not a clever desperate fight as the words suggest but a brawl, points scored by decibel.
And to top it all off, there is an almighty explosion at the end of the play as the prison is blown up. I almost leapt into the lap of the person next to me and it must have left audience members shaken. Although spectacular, it left me feeling it was a shock tactic.
But even this explosion could not cut through a relentless tragedy which inspires little sympathy.
