2,600 years ago, we are told by Professor Edith Hall in her introduction to Euripides’ play The Trojan Women, the brutal tyrant of Pherae in northern Greece left a performance of the play because he did not want people to see him weep. I know how he felt.
The Trojan Women is an amazingly feminist and pacificist play, and one that has often been performed during 20th century wars. It is a reminder that in so many wars most of the casualties are women and children. A dear friend of mine, Ann Neville, directed it at Questors during the 2nd Iraq war and asked me to curate the sound track, which I gladly did. The play has often been set in the location of a current conflict, as was Ann's.
I recently got hold of the 1971 film of The Trojan Women directed by the Cypriot Michael Cacoyannis, who set it amidst the ruins of ancient Troy. He made Zorba the Greek in 1964, and two other Euripides plays, Electra in 1962 and Iphigenia 1977. The Trojan Women were Hecuba, widow of the Trojan King Priam and mother of Hector played by Katherine Hepburn (3 years after The Lion in Winter) played by Katherine Hepburn (3 years after The Lion in Winter); Andromache, Hector’s widow played Vanessa Redgrave (4 years after Camelot); and Cassandra, Hecuba’s daughter, played by Genevieve Bujold (2 years after Anne of a Thousand Days). Irene Papas ( 7 years after Zorba The Greek) as the Greek Helen.
They are all now in the hands of the Greek victors, the Trojan women doomed to be their slaves or concubines. Each of these actresses was magnificent, the first three giving voice to their own character’s grief (or in Cassandra's case, madness) - plus Irene Papas' Helen, so calm and haughty as she blames everyone else for the war, including her Spartan husband Menelaus who had foolishly left her alone in his Palace with the handsome Paris, Aphrodite who had promised her to Paris as a bribe to win the Golden Apple , and even his mother Hecuba for taking him back into the Trojan Royal Household after having first of all abandoned him. She did have a point.
The opening scenes of the film seem rather chaotic, but so was the situation, and Cassandra was out of her mind, but then each of the other women have their time in the spotlight. These actresses were all in their own ways beautiful as well as brilliant actresses, which added to the pathos. (Should their beauty do that? Maybe not, but for me it did!)
One surprise for me was the appearance of Brian Blessed, then in his mid 30's, as Talthybius, the Greek Herald who has to tell each of the women their fate, and in Andromache's case the fate of her child, the son of Hector. Brian Blessed had not yet become BRIAN BLESSED, and gave a really sensitive performance.
Last year read Ferdia Lennon’s novel Glorious Exploits in which Athenian POWs in Syracuse are persuaded to perform this play, and heard Natalie Haynes’s praise for it – particularly for Helen’s outrageous speech – in BBC R4’s Natalie Haynes Stand Up For the Classics series. Her knowledge and wit are a painless way to explore the Classics, and are all available through BBC Sounds.
There are now some wonderful and accessible translations of these plays and of the Homeric classics available, and in the last 20 years some female writers have produced novels following in Euripides’ footsteps by telling the stories of women whose voices are rarely heard in these classics. Margaret Atwood led the pack, as so often, with her 2005 novel The Penelopiad, and some of my favourites are Circe by the American Madeline Miller and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. Christopher Nolan’s film of the Odyssey is on its way, and Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche joined forces again nearly 30 years after The English Patient recently in The Return, telling about Odysseus’s homecoming after 20 years.
People have not been telling and retelling these millennial old stories for no good reason. They are tasty and satisfying when served fresh.
