Women and Troy

by David Stuttard after Euripides

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildfords on 27 July 2025

David Stuttard created these dramatic readings from Euripides's tragedy The Trojan Women, supplemented by some speeches from Andromache and his reconstructions of the lost Alexandros, partly in response to the 9-11 attacks in 2001: the notion of the passengers on the planes being trapped inside a vehicle reminded him, he said, of the warriors in the wooden horse, though the analogy is by no means exact. However, the theme of the brutality and inhumanity of war remains all too relevant today.

The readings, given by Siân Phillips as Hekabe (Hecuba) and Rachel Donovan speaking variously as Athene, Cassandra, Andromache and Helen, reveal the complex web of fate whereby the infant Trojan prince Alexandros (the other name for Paris) was sent to be exposed on the slopes of Mount Ida to forestall a prophecy that he would ruin the city of Troy, but instead was found and raised by kindly shepherds. Later, having received Helen of Sparta as a reward (or bribe) for judging Aphrodite to be the fairest of the three goddesses Athene, Aphrodite and Hera, he did indeed ruin the city.

The action of The Trojan Women takes place soon after the fall of the city as the female members of the royal family face enslavement and degradation; Hekabe reels under successive blows of bad news, in particular the callous murder of her young grandson Astyanax (the son of Hector and Andromache), thrown from the city walls by the victorious Greeks in case he should grow up to be a threat to them.

Even presented as 'dramatic readings' from two lecterns the story is compelling and the grief and despair raw and intense. The two actors switched from deep identification with their characters to detached commentary, and in the Q and A session afterwards remarked that in some ways it was easier to be 'reading' rather than 'declaiming' or acting in a full production, because it allowed for these shifts and removed the problems of staging, costuming and movement: all was dependent on the poetry, which was admirably translated and adapted.

The readings lasted only an hour or so but the grim tale was vividly presented. In the week that I saw this performance, not directly referred to but nevertheless clear in my mind as I listened to Hekabe mourn over the broken body her little grandson, were the photographs of the children starving in Gaza. The ghastliness of war, and the ease with which its perpetrators justify any barbarity they choose to inflict on one another, has hardly changed in 2500 years.