This is an incredible project – two plays, a decade or so apart, fused to provide a broader, kaleidoscopic insight into the brutalisation of the women of Troy by the ancient Greeks. After Troy was going to be 'Sex in the Ruins' initially, but curdled, deepened, and lost the irresponsible serving of “sex”. I presume the author and dramaturg meant 'rape' and I'm heartily glad they saw the light.
Lifeblood Theatre and the Onassis programme, therefore, bring Oxford a full length, cosmic scale giga-tragedy about the loss of children and the madness of tribelessness and imprisonment. Eve Matheson is blindingly good as Hecuba. Amy Noble, Rebecca Smith-Williams and Hannah Barrie shine as her daughters. Antony Byrne is excellent. The whole company is impeccably Stanislavskian. They're gruelling to watch.
Glyn Maxwell and Alex Clifton had “done a workshop together at RADA about imprisoned women encircled by victorious powerful men”. The result is certainly profoundly touching. It shows the extent of female suffering at the hands of militarist masculinist history… but it doesn't bring justice. In fact, as Maxwell all but admits in the programme, it itself subjects non male actors to yet more experiments in cruelty, for the sake of art. Says Maxwell: “It got a little disturbing how much fun it was to mess with them [the women playing Helen, Hecuba, Andromache, Polyxena and Cassandra]”. There is a heavy responsibility involved in reaping one's theatrical effects so heavily off the back of the spectacle of weeping degraded princesses.
I remain uncomfortable about this aspect of the evening. Yet inescapably After Troy finds itself being about the dream of redress from imbalances in representation and power. (The oppressed element always talks back somehow.) So in some ways, that required redress is explored. Maxwell, for instance, turned a walk-on messenger into a considerable part: the excellent Iain Batchelor gets it. The three Greek men are thus Agamemnon, Talthybius, and this 'Kratos', whose name had to be found for him in the 21st century. There is also the bathetic Mestor-of-Mestor, Nicholas Tennant's superbly disgusting megalomaniac king. His comeuppance suggests the destiny of all delusional patriarch-perverts. But it also maintains the distinction between 'bad' kings and others, suggesting that the mainstream warmongers and pillagers keep some claim to being justified and noble.
I suppose I'm saying this isn't an ideologically radical rewriting, much as it 'radically' plays with the original material. Someone described the author to me recently as incredibly dynamic, but somewhat like a car salesman. It must all flower out of his imagination into space, then. He must really hear it. Maxwell is a big cheese in NYC, whose various oeuvres – the novel Blue Burneau, the poetry collections Tale of the Mayor's Son, Out of the Rain, Rest for the Wicked and The Breakage, and plays The Forever Waltz and Broken Journey – have attracted several prizes. Maxwell studied English both here at Oxford and in Boston with Derek Walcott, before teaching it at Amherst, Columbia and the New School. He has established Grecian culture as written culture, and Trojan culture as oral. It is the Trojans we fall for. Maxwell has damn well mastered the spoken word.
Lifeblood Theatre and the Onassis programme, therefore, bring Oxford a full length, cosmic scale giga-tragedy about the loss of children and the madness of tribelessness and imprisonment. Eve Matheson is blindingly good as Hecuba. Amy Noble, Rebecca Smith-Williams and Hannah Barrie shine as her daughters. Antony Byrne is excellent. The whole company is impeccably Stanislavskian. They're gruelling to watch.
Glyn Maxwell and Alex Clifton had “done a workshop together at RADA about imprisoned women encircled by victorious powerful men”. The result is certainly profoundly touching. It shows the extent of female suffering at the hands of militarist masculinist history… but it doesn't bring justice. In fact, as Maxwell all but admits in the programme, it itself subjects non male actors to yet more experiments in cruelty, for the sake of art. Says Maxwell: “It got a little disturbing how much fun it was to mess with them [the women playing Helen, Hecuba, Andromache, Polyxena and Cassandra]”. There is a heavy responsibility involved in reaping one's theatrical effects so heavily off the back of the spectacle of weeping degraded princesses.
I remain uncomfortable about this aspect of the evening. Yet inescapably After Troy finds itself being about the dream of redress from imbalances in representation and power. (The oppressed element always talks back somehow.) So in some ways, that required redress is explored. Maxwell, for instance, turned a walk-on messenger into a considerable part: the excellent Iain Batchelor gets it. The three Greek men are thus Agamemnon, Talthybius, and this 'Kratos', whose name had to be found for him in the 21st century. There is also the bathetic Mestor-of-Mestor, Nicholas Tennant's superbly disgusting megalomaniac king. His comeuppance suggests the destiny of all delusional patriarch-perverts. But it also maintains the distinction between 'bad' kings and others, suggesting that the mainstream warmongers and pillagers keep some claim to being justified and noble.
I suppose I'm saying this isn't an ideologically radical rewriting, much as it 'radically' plays with the original material. Someone described the author to me recently as incredibly dynamic, but somewhat like a car salesman. It must all flower out of his imagination into space, then. He must really hear it. Maxwell is a big cheese in NYC, whose various oeuvres – the novel Blue Burneau, the poetry collections Tale of the Mayor's Son, Out of the Rain, Rest for the Wicked and The Breakage, and plays The Forever Waltz and Broken Journey – have attracted several prizes. Maxwell studied English both here at Oxford and in Boston with Derek Walcott, before teaching it at Amherst, Columbia and the New School. He has established Grecian culture as written culture, and Trojan culture as oral. It is the Trojans we fall for. Maxwell has damn well mastered the spoken word.