The Trojan Women

The Trojan War is over, all the Trojan heroes have fallen; in front of the burning rubble of the once famous city the Trojan women and their children are waiting to go into Greek slavery. The women, lead by the aged queen Hecuba, decry their sad fate and that of their city. The Queen’s daughter Cassandra is destined to become a concubine to Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, her daughter in law, Andromache, a wife to Achilles’s son, while her daughter Polyxena will be sacrificed on Achilles’s grave, and the queen herself will be a slave to Odysseus. Even Andromache’s son, their last hope for the revival of the city, has been destined to die by the merciless winners. The Trojan women blame the beautiful Helen for all the evil that has befallen them; she was the one whom Prince Paris had effortlessly taken from the Spartan King Menelaus, the perpetrator of this war. The women’s confrontation is merciless, but it cannot ease the tragedy of the post-war suffering. While the burning city is turning into rubble, the Trojan women are being forced  to leave their native land and enter slavery.

Euripides’s tragedy from 415 BC is set into the mythological era of the Trojan war, but is most likely the playwright’s commentary to the then pertinent Peloponnesus war in which Athens was fighting Sparta; perhaps even to the Athenian march to the neutral island of Melos and the slaughter or enslavement of its population. Euripides’s ideas were revolutionary and revolting to Athens then, so he often ended up second in drama competitions. In his works, he often spoke for the “humiliated and disrespected”, for slaves, women and, as in the Trojan women, for prisoners from a city hostile to Athens. The play is a condemnation of unjust wars, it questions the responsibility and guilt for them, so it is understandable that it has often been staged in the contexts of the then-current political circumstances. The most famous adaptation was the one by Jean Paul Sartre, which includes implicit criticism of European imperialism in Asia, and in 1971 Mihalis Kakogiannis made a film with Katherine Hepburn in the main role. The first Slovenian staging is director Jaša Koceli’s debut on the SNG Nova Gorica stage.