'The Trojan Women' in 21st-Century Greece

Euripides' The Trojan Women, first produced at the City Dionysia in Athens in 415 B.C.E., is among the most difficult of Classical tragedies to stage for a modern audience. It consists mostly of the lamentations of the women of Troy after the fall of their city, as they await exile and enslavement at the hands of their Greek conquerors. Grief is piled on top of grief, woe on woe. The play offers very little in the way of dramatic action and nothing in the way of relief or reprieve, either for the women or for the audience.

One assumes that the Greeks themselves, accustomed to long recitations and stylized laments, would have taken such long set pieces in stride. Presumably they would have been familiar with the characters, all drawn from the central legend of Greek history and frequently represented on the Athenian stage. They would have judged the play against earlier takes on the Trojan War, somewhat the way opera buffs today compare different sopranos in La Traviata.

Today's Greeks haven't quite forgotten The Iliad, of course, but a modern audience— even a Greek one— no longer feels the intimate connection with the Euripides play that might have been expected 2,400 years ago, or even during the Renaissance.

When Shakespeare's Hamlet asks, "What's Hecuba to him?," he would have presumed that at least some of his audience, if not the groundlings, would recognize the reference to the Queen of Troy. Not so today, when people with advanced degrees, at least in this country, couldn't tell Medea from Queen Mab.

A city like New Haven

So I was curious as to how a provincial Greek company, the Civic Theater of Patras, would handle The Trojan Women. Patras is Greece's third largest city, and one with its own Greco-Roman history, but it's only about the size of New Haven. It does have an ancient Odeon, and also a Frankish castle, against whose spectacular backdrop this production was staged.

It also, on the night I attended, had a capacity audience, almost all consisting of locals. Given the infantile pap one routinely finds on Greek TV, it's heartening to see that, at least here, the classics don't yet have to be sold.

Still, they do need to be presented persuasively to a modern theatergoer. We can only conjecture how the ancient Greeks performed their plays. It probably wasn't like the static recitative adopted by the classical revival a century ago, since the ancient theater had its roots in Dionysian rituals that were anything but decorous.

Uncertain fate

Theodoris Abazis, director of the Patras production, opted for an Expressionist style characterized by broken, stabbing speech rhythms at variable pitch, accompanied by jerky, sometimes spastic motions, all highly stylized and controlled by an extraordinarily capable and disciplined cast, most notably Georgina Deliana as the seeress Cassandra, who is presumed in the play to be "mad," i.e., both turned by grief and subject to prophetic rapture.

In contrast, the regal Andromache (an impressive Danni Saridaki), stands her ground magnificently, alternating between declamation and accusation in her address to the audience.

The principal character, of course, is Hecuba, the last Queen of Troy, whose lament— after some stage business between Athena and Poseidon— opens the play, and who crawls toward the flames that will consume Troy's ruins at its end. This is one of the theater's great roles, and the veteran actress Anna Kokkinou, despite the physical and vocal limitations of age, brought it off with much dignity and no little power.

The women of Troy are thus each sharply delineated. Their pathos is underlined by their uncertain fate, since at the beginning of the play none yet knows which of their conquerors (all despised, of course) will enslave them. Proud Hecuba herself doesn't yet contemplate suicide, for life, even at its most degraded, is still life, and the Greeks had few illusions about what awaited them beyond the grave.

One conflicted character

It's part of the psychological penetration and dramatic realism that makes Euripides so resonant a figure for us that he humanizes his protagonists in this way. The women of Troy have lost everything— their homes, their city, their men, even their children— but not the will to live. Even in their stoutest grief, some cherish hopes of kindness and others of vengeance, but all hold hope of some sort until Hecuba, at the end, greets oblivion with open arms.

The only genuinely conflicted character in the play is the Greek herald, Talthybius, who must bring the news of the Greeks' grim justice, and, moved, by the suffering he sees, grows more and more reluctant in his task.

The last and worst of the victors' judgments is that Hecuba's grandson, the child Astyanax, must be killed so that no male seed remains to renew Trojan honor. Talthybius chases the child, who takes fright and attempts to flee; but, in a brilliant directorial stroke, Abazis has him finally stop and, trustfully taking Talthybius's hand, go off with him to meet a fate he is too young to fully comprehend.

Nothing could more strikingly display both the young prince's instinctive nobility and the shamefulness of the Greeks' action. It's a uniquely signifying moment.

Helen's ultimate irony

One Trojan woman does not grieve and displays no apparent fear, although her sisters shun her and her death is demanded by all. This is Helen (Katrina Didaskalou), wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, whose elopement with the Trojan prince Paris— Euripides clearly regards Helen's supposed abduction as a myth— provoked the great war and Troy's downfall.

Helen is to be returned to Menelaus (Konstantinos Avarikiotis) for judgment. She defends her conduct before the only jury she is likely to have, but she hopes (rightfully) that the charm she still exerts on Menelaus will win her cause. This Helen is no longer young, but she still cuts a grand figure and knows how to use it.

Here is the ultimate irony of the play: The one woman who triumphs is the one solely deserving of punishment.

Euripides vs. Aeschylus

This paradox is pure Euripides. Although justice is often harsh in Aeschylus and Sophocles, they never let wickedness slip through the cracks, let alone make a fair show of itself. Of course, the point in Euripides is that wickedness isn't so easily defined, nor is the blame for disastrous events so easily assigned.

This latter point is the most striking and provocative thing about The Trojan Women. For the Greeks, and particularly the Athenians, the Trojan War was the cornerstone of their imperial destiny. To present the Trojans as sympathetic victims of Greek aggression and rapine before a Greek audience was audacious indeed, particularly in the midst of another war— the Peloponnesian— which had just resumed after a five-year truce.

To be sure, Aeschylus had treated a defeated enemy as the subject of tragedy in The Persians, but in that case there had been no question that the Persians had reaped what they had sown. Euripides, by contrast, suggested the absurdity of war itself, as well as the heartlessness and brutality of the Greek victors.

Was there, indeed, as Hecuba suggests in the play, no shame in the Greeks' demanding the butchery of a small child? Or was the final razing of Troy itself an act of shame, to bury forever a site of atrocity?

Swaggering bullies

In The Trojan Women, the captains and heroes of The Iliad are reduced to the figure of a single swaggering bully: Menelaus, who's led by the nose by a faithless wife. Let's try to imagine an American tragedy about Vietnam centered on the massacre at My Lai, with a fatuous William Westmoreland as the representative figure, or one about Iraq with a Donald Rumsfeld shrugging off the destruction of Sumerian antiquities with "Stuff happens."

Can't do it? Neither can I. Yet Euripides did the equivalent, and his audience was sufficiently tolerant to award him a second prize. (First prize went to one Xenocles, whose name alone survives.)

Why produce The Trojan Women now in Greece? As I watched, it occurred to me that if one substituted the word "Germany" for Greece and "Greece" for Troy, the play is a stunningly topical allegory of the present-day looting of Greece by a German-dominated European Union and its International Monetary Fund handmaiden, and the audience watching it was— but for a foreign reviewer who would soon return to an America beleaguered only by itself— witnessing its own destiny unfold. Whether the Greeks will continue to suffer passively as the Trojan women did remains to be seen.