Ovid's Women
Burton-Taylor Theatre
Tue 1st - Sat 5th Feb 2005 9.30pm

Being a character in a Greek tragedy sucks. The clue is in the word “tragedy”. Being a woman in a Greek tragedy sucks even more. Ovid’s Women has its basis in that simple observation.

The play is really a set of five interwoven monologues, each told from the point of view of one of the female characters from the works of Ovid, the characters in question being Medea, Hypermnestra, Helen, Dido and Penelope.

I went into this play having very, very little idea of the original stories of the women involved. I did not feel that this was a disadvantage, as most of the women explain their stories throughout the course of the play (the major exception being Helen, but it is not unreasonable to expect the audience to be familiar with Helen of Troy at the very least).

The five actresses all hold their own as their various characters, although they obviously have some extremely big shoes to fill (this being a perennial problem with the Classics: characters that well-known come with a lot of associated baggage). Heather Oliver gives a particularly fine turn as Dido, pleading with her invisible Aeneas to remain by her side in Carthage. Her portrayal of a once mighty woman brought low for the love of a man is both affecting and convincing.

The play has some idiosyncrasies that bear mentioning. It seems sometimes as if the script cannot decide between formal and informal speech (in Helen’s and Hypermnestra’s monologues particularly). This sometimes jars. By similar token, all of the characters are in period costume, except for Helen, who is in modern dress. This may well be deliberate, but if so I am not entirely certain what it is trying to achieve. Certainly Helen’s story is in a rather different context from the others; the other women have been left by their husbands, she is leaving hers; the others (or at least Penelope and Dido) have suffered as a result of the Trojan War, which Helen is about to start; but this juxtaposition doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

The play is at its strongest when the stories of the women overlap, either directly (with Penelope and Dido both having to deal with the aftermath of Troy), or thematically (Hypermnestra and Penelope waiting for their husbands, Dido and Medea cursing the faithlessness of their lovers). These moments of overlap, however, do not come quite as regularly or as naturally as they might.

The bottom line then, is it worth seeing? Ultimately, this is one of those productions where you can probably gauge your reaction to the play by your reaction to the premise. It’s five monologues by and about female characters from Greek tragedies. It’s a bit heavy on the oestrogen, but if you’re interested in that sort of play, then you’ll probably be interested in this. If you aren’t, then you probably won’t. Simple as that.

Daniel Hemmens, 02/02/05