Review: THE TROJAN WOMEN, Lyric Hammersmith

It is the tragedy of Greek Tragedy that, like a bad penny, it keeps coming back, stories comprising horrors that repeat and repeat and repeat. Euripides’ The Trojan Women is one such and, a couple of clicks away from you right now, you can read, and worse, see, their successors now in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Israel, in South Sudan and, well, the list goes on.

It’s no surprise then to see the Young Lyric’s 2024 cohort of Springboard trainees reach thousands of years into the past to say something about life today. In a reimagining of the tragedy, Dipo Baruwa-Etti has created a dystopian England of the near-future, a MadMaxian world of fear, hunger and corruption. Since this world is much closer to ours than either Ancient Greece or post-apocalypse Australia, the exaggerations are minimal, the satire on the nose, the warning sharper for the power of its immediacy. 

Springboard’s company of ten 18-25 year olds leap into the play with skill and enthusiasm, some playing a range of roles, some playing Euripides’ central characters, all in a black box studio space with acoustics as unforgiving as the politicians in whose hands the fate of the populace rests. You can almost see them learning in real time.

We’re in a foodbank, volunteers serving their community as carnage rages in the streets - it really isn’t so much of a jump from a few short weeks ago. The manager, Hettie, a calm Jada Khan, believes in getting by, but is frustrated that her role as a councillor is stymied by a venal national government, ostensibly led by Merlin (Samuel Glyde-Rees, channelling countless little men) but actually by his wife, Helen. Jessica Rose Saunders, in a cream suit halfway between boardroom and catwalk, captures much of a recent prime minister or two’s misplaced confidence, the arrogance pulling her and her country by the nose towards disaster. 

Zamir Mesiti as Tallon and Ema Pasic as Cassie (geddit?) present two visions of the future, the sociologist reluctant to act on his research, the visionary dismissed as a crank. Aine McNamara is the voice of the ordinary person who just wants to get by, while Aneeza Selina Ahmed’s pregnant feisty Andra wants a better world for her child. Rounding out the cast, Michelle San Reis and Lumumba Diessa give us a couple of cynical spads, in it for their own gratification and Cameron Goodchild, in a bit of nominative determinism, is the young idealist being sidelined by the regime. 

The themes and characters of Greek Tragedy are all present and it’s sobering to see how easily they slide into the present day. The hope is, of course, that we won’t end up burning down the house and, if we do, it’ll be because programmes like Springboard demonstrate how cooperation, trust and empathy can produce the outcomes they do, largely unheralded, all around the country. Embracing The Trojan Women’s allegorical if not literal moral, it will be the task of the generation on stage to dismantle the failing society built by mine and create a new one, with the Hetties, and not the Helens, in charge.  

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Photo Credits: Genevieve Girling