Euripides's great anti-war play has been constantly updated. But much as I relished the linguistic vigour and pugnacious wit of Caroline Bird's new version, described as "after Euripides", I wished it had gone even further. If Sartre could turn the play into a comment on France's colonial war in Algeria, why not find some contemporary political equivalent?
Bird and new artistic director Christopher Haydon even retain the original's divine framework, via a video showing Roger Lloyd Pack and Tamsin Greig as a fractious Poseidon and Athena. But the main action takes place in the mother-and-baby unit of a prison where captive Trojan women wait to learn their fate after their city's fall. What Bird brings out, with startling clarity, are the divisions among the defeated. Hecuba, the former Trojan queen, still clings to the privileges of rank, and she and her daughter-in-law, Andromache, both treat the Chorus, a pregnant woman handcuffed to a bed, with arrogant disdain. Suffering clearly has its hierarchies; and the tragedy is offset by wild comedy, as when the multi-skilled Andromache complains she is now enslaved to Achilles's son, "all because he'd heard about my fucking salmon and hollandaise tarts".
Haydon's production has an in-yer-face directness in this intimate space, and the acting is first-rate. Dearbhla Molloy as Hecuba brings out the snottiness as well as the sadness of a former queen unable to adjust to her surroundings, Lucy Ellinson's Chorus has a grittiness that oddly reminded me of the teenage heroine Jo in A Taste of Honey, and Louise Brealey pulls off a remarkable treble by playing the mad Cassandra, the anguished Andromache and the devious Helen, who blames her infidelity on Aphrodite. But that last point neatly encapsulates the dilemma of this production. It keeps one foot in the classical world while ushering us into a modern milieu of riot-shields, smartphones and tannoys. While I enjoyed it, I longed for it to go the whole hog.
What have you been to see lately? Tell us about it on Twitter using #GdnReview
