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Women of Troy: Dominic Cavendish talks to the creative team

Is there any other play in world drama in which the horror of war is more starkly and piteously depicted than it is in Women of Troy? DOMINIC CAVENDISH asks the questions...

Euripides’ tragedy presents its audience with a vision of total devastation. Troy has fallen to the Greeks, bringing to a blood-drenched close the 10-year conflict that began with Paris’ abduction of Helen, the wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. The consequences for the losers are dire. With their men-folk slain, those women who have survived face the prospect of being distributed as spoils. As a race, their future – embodied by Hector’s four-month-old son, Astyanax – is blotted out; the baby is taken from his mother Andromache and dashed to pieces. Before our eyes, a civilisation is wiped off the map: when the last ships depart with their slave cargo on board, Troy’s remnants are razed to the ground.

‘Soon no-one will remember this city, Everything is dying, even the name; There is no place on earth called Troy.’

As Katie Mitchell, directing the National’s new production of the play, explains: Euripides wasn’t drawing solely on the mythologised past in this account of systematic annihilation. He was writing in the wake of the Greeks’ ruthless subjugation of the island of Melos for its refusal to side with Athens against Sparta during the Peloponnesian War.

‘The play was triggered by his sense of moral outrage at what troops from his country had done to another country. I think Euripides was very angry and close to despair at the military situation he was living through.’ This revival, using a judiciously pruned version by Don Taylor, will see the Trojan women occupying an imaginary theatrical terrain that draws, as she explains, on four eras: ‘We’re drawing from the pot of the Bronze age, from Homer’s time, Euripides’ time and our time. This is a world in which the women can wear the latest ball-gowns and yet believe in several gods.’ In its modern aspect, it will be more explicitly up-to-the-minute than Mitchell’s widely lauded National productions of The Oresteia (2000) and Iphigenia at Aulis (2004). ‘You will see people wearing the clothes that will be worn at Christmas parties this season,’ she says. ‘You’ll be looking at a warehouse that could have been built in the last two decades, a functioning industrial port.’ And that’s because, as she argues, there’s nothing safely out of reach about what Euripides describes. ‘World events lead me to the Greeks,‘ she says. ‘When we did The Oresteia, the war in Yugoslavia was just coming to an end and I wanted to find a piece that would have a conversation with that conflict. When I did Iphigenia, the involvement in the Middle East was just beginning and now we’re involved yet again in the Middle East. The Greek plays seem to provide some of the best material to confront the bigger events in the world we’re living in.’

This is not going to be an evening for the faint- hearted. ‘It’s hard to make and hard to watch. You will watch what happened to people who are, in newspaper-speak, ‘collateral damage.’ But, contrary to how it might appear at first glance, the play isn’t simply an open invitation to bear witness to unbearable suffering. ‘When you first read it, it seems to be all about the grief of the Trojan women,’ Mitchell says. Actually, it’s about their conflict with the Greek men who have to oversee their transportation. The men in our production are more like civil servants and diplomats. They’re trying to negotiate so that both achieve some sense of what they want. The women want to know where they’re going. The men want to get them there with the least disturbance as possible, so that
they in turn can get back to their homes in Greece.’

It‘s a wonderfully subtle story. At some moments, the Greek soldiers show immense decency and at others lack entirely. Some moments the Trojans are careful and respectful and at other points they lose it. The question we‘re asking here is: how do people on the ground, in modern-day warfare, deal with the prisoners they’ve taken?’ When two cultures collide and the victor stares straight in the face of the vanquished
what happens?

THE MITCHELL METHOD
During her career, KATIE MITCHELL has acquired a formidable reputation for being at once provocatively fresh in her approach and hugely rigorous in her method. Here she explains how she prepares before the rehearsal period:
First I do a series of analytical tasks on the material to check I understand every inch of it before I consider any interpretation. I take all the component elements apart and study them incredibly carefully and make sure my connection to the material is not biasing me in a certain direction. I do as much research as possible – you have to know why it was written, how it was initially performed, the historical context. Then I make decisions about how to communicate the play. I cut the material, foregrounding certain elements, and embark on the design process, looking for a logical environment in which all the action could realistically happen. You need to consider not just the place in which the play happens but the rest of the city.’

So immersed will her actors be in the world of the play by the end of rehearsals that they will be able to turn 360 degrees on stage, and their character will have a picture in their mind’s eye of what lies beyond – the geography, the history, even the time of day in their city... their beautiful, destroyed city.

DESIGNING ILIUM FOR THE 21st CENTURY
BUNNY CHRISTIE explains the look of Women of Troy
The set model-box for Women of Troy is looking slightly the worse for wear when designer Bunny Christie tracks it down to one of the hangar-like workshops at the National where scenery construction takes place. Some of the diminutive walls aren’t aligned properly – a few are even arranged back to front. Christie is happy, though: ‘I love seeing it like this,’ she says. ‘If it’s bashed about that means that the team are hard at work bringing it to life. They’re getting stuck in.’

Just by looking at the model-box, you can see that Christie has been thinking on a grand scale. The Lyttelton stage will be dominated by a huge split-level warehouse interior, every aspect of which has been intricately thought through.

‘When we started thinking about how a group of prisoners of war would be moved in a modern context, we considered various locations – like airports and bus terminals. Early on, though, Katie decided that, because of the play’s many references to the sea, it should be a port.’

Christie visited and photographed ports in her native Scotland, principally Dundee and Leith. ’It gave me a good sense of the scale. There were then precise logistical problems that we needed to solve – like where do we put Cassandra? And how do we keep Helen away from the other women? We also needed to ensure the space could conceivably handle the processing of hundreds of women.’

Christie is no stranger to the National. She recently designed Philistines for the Lyttelton and prior to that Galileo in the Olivier. A longstanding fan of Katie Mitchell’s work, this is the first time the pair have collaborated and Christie has eagerly embraced the director’s meticulous working methods. ‘You don’t just deal with what’s being seen but what’s happening all around. How do the women get there? By train, by coach? And when they leave where are they going to? I sketched aerial views the area. We needed to create a whole world.’

Christie describes the warehouse space as ‘cold, industrial, dark’. Particular
decisions have added to that austerity. ‘Early on, we had some windows that were quite low down. We decided to remove those because it would be more threatening if the women couldn’t see where they were being taken to. They believe they’re being put on ships but they might be taken to their death.’

When the set is combined with Paule Constable’s lighting, the bombardments of Gareth Fry’s soundscape and Vicki Mortimer’s contemporary costumes, the effect should be stunning. ‘The audience will absolutely feel that there’s this great port outside where the ships are leaving and that the war is coming closer and closer.’ Finally, she adds. ‘We’ve been researching the effects of explosives. At the end, the bombs start falling overhead. People had better brace themselves.’


GREEKS AND TROJANS, WINNERS AND LOSERS
MICHAEL GOULD (Talthybius)
In this version of the play, Talthybius and Sinon are the Greek civil servants who supervise the Trojan women. Talthybius tells them how they’re going to be allocated and later he has to take Andromache’s son and drop him from the battlements. Is he the hate-figure in the play? To say that would undermine its complexity. I think he struggles with what he has to do but he knows he has to get it done because his overriding desire is to get home. You could say that women suffer at the hands of men but I think it’s more interesting to show that it’s human beings who suffer at the hands of war. War is the hate figure.

HELENA LYMBERY (Rhea)
I’m one of a group of seven women who are the last of the evacuees to be rounded up and shipped out. We’ve inferred that they’re educated but within that shared class background, there are separate life stories. In rehearsal, we gather through provisation a set of mental pictures that we’re going to draw on in relation to particular moments of the play. These women witness specific acts of horror, carnage and massacre. By building up a detailed back-history, when these moments arise, they should really resonate. So, if you have a memory of treating a slave badly, the thought of becoming a slave yourself taps into that guilt and fear. It’s about making those moments very real, not just acting out generalised distress. And on a deep level, the play is looking at how any of us might behave in a chaotic violent situation.

KATE DUCHENE (Hecuba)
At the start of the play, the Trojan queen Hecuba has two daughters. One is taken away from her to become a slave, the second she learns has been butchered. Then her four-month old grandson – the last remaining royal – is taken away and thrown from the battlements. These are about the worst things that can happen to a human being and it feels like a gruelling part to undertake. Sometimes I think ‘Why are we putting ourselves through it?’ But actually in the world today there are women who have to suffer far worse things than we see on stage. Like most people I block out things I see on the news. The play feels like an attempt to cut through that blocking mechanism and confront what we’re too scared to look at.

Articles written by Dominic Cavendish, theatre critic for the Daily Telegraph and founder of www.theatrevoice.com