The Trojan Women

After the fall of Troy, the Greeks slaughtered the Trojan women or carried them off as prizes. The men they’d fought for ten years all lay dead, the city was burning, yet still the widows, sisters and children had to be put to the sword. The women were the spoils of war, even Helen, the flighty queen whose face had launched a thousand the great beauty became the men’s most prized booty. A whole city, a whole civilisation was in flames, but Helen would go home with the husband she’d jilted. The war need not have happened.
Euripides shocked his audiences by portraying their great heroes as cruel and cowardly. His Trojan Women is one of the most powerful indictments of war ever written. In this new version for Dublin’s Peacock Theatre, Brendan Kennelly gives the play a twentieth-century edge. The women are usually seen as passive victims at the whimsical mercy of their male conquerors, but Kennelly draws from them a strong, active, resolute and shrewd note. This note of active resolution, so closely linked with seemingly utter hopelessness, is brought forth through the poet’s language in waves suggesting both the women’s spirits and the sea itself.
Through Kennelly’s words, the Trojan women come to know despite total humiliation, they will keep their dignity, aware that they will be the moral and emotional victors in the continuing war with the men. He turns the play into an active drama exploring the complexities of the women, defining the nature of their courage. ‘It was their different kinds of intensity that I found most magnetic,’ he says. ‘This play tries to present those mesmeric intensities in a fit language.’
‘Almost fifty years ago, I heard the women in the village where I grew up say of another woman, She’s a Trojan, meaning she had tremendous powers of endurance and survival, was determined to overcome disappointment and distress, was dogged but never insensitive, obstinate but never blackscowling, and seemed eternally capable of renewing herself. And she did all this with a consciousness that seemed to deepen both her suffering and her strength.’ And so Kennelly draws upon the spirit of all those Trojan women, not just the stalwart country women of his childhood, but Irish women in all the towns and cities, and women throughout the world, women everywhere.