The Women of Troy, National Theatre
**
The grief suffered by The Women of Troy is huge: city destroyed, husbands and children murdered, friends raped by the triumphant Greeks. Yet Katie Mitchell’s production fails to deliver the horror and pathos that this should inspire.
Her women are locked in a prison which looks like an underground carpark with cafeteria tables. They are dressed in cocktail dresses and fumble futilely through make-up bags, evidently plucked from a far more salubrious setting. The gap between the high life and rock bottom is a perfect place from which to mine the power of despair.
But Mitchell’s decision to stylise their misery means this opportunity is lost. The chorus of women are reduced to representations of hysteria. They twitch and moan in regular patterns, twirl fabric around fingers, eyes wide with horror: all sterotypes of psychological trauma.
It is an annoying way to present collective shock; but it also means that when the tragedies pile up, it’s a body count instead of an examination of human suffering.
There are moments of beauty. The women drift into ballroom dancing, a ghostly evocation of a previous existence. There is an impressive scene when a woman performs a grotesque parody of the dance, her limbs jerking around in death throes, like a broken string puppet.
There are also scenes when convincing feeling seeps through the stylised surface. Andromache tells Hecuba that her daughter is dead, and the exchange is a quieter and more powerful examination of unbearable grief.
However, these are outnumbered by shouty scenes: the shrieking Cassandra is carted off to marry Agamemnon, stripping off and setting fire to dustbins before she goes. The debate between between Clytemnestra and Helen is not a desperate battle of wits as the script suggests but a brawl, points scored by decibel.
To top it all off, there is an almighty explosion at the end of the play as the prison is blown up. I almost leapt into the lap of the person next to me (which was probably more shocking for her than the explosion). Although spectacular, it was a shock tactic.
But even this explosion could not cut through a relentless tragedy that inspires little sympathy.
