Trojan Women in Surrey!

Today I presented our school production of the Greek Tragedy 'The Trojan Women.' As the audience filed in, to take their seats on all four sides of the stage space, the sound of the sea (timeless symbol of fate) played through the speakers. Six A’ level Theatre Students lay spread-eagled across a large rectangle of bark-chippings and compost representing the desolate Trojan soil in the aftermath of war. The lighting was a dim wash of blue to suggest night. Were these women dressed in bloody robes, asleep or dead? It must have seemed an age for the actresses, as the students filled up the intimate drama studio. Some sat on the floor in front of the front rows of benches, and others were escorted upstairs to the gallery above the stage. It was a packed house! The sound of the sea dissolved into a track from Wellspring - a sublime piece of music improvised by strings. The women slowly rose from the stage, as if rising from their graves and formed a circle around a basic stone altar in the centre. Here with the lights still low, they performed a simple ritual, suggesting a sort of cleansing of their blood-stained robes, rather like that described in the Apocalypse of St. John. This could be interpreted in different ways; a dream, a flash-back to a time before the war, or a revelation of an after-life, for these hapless victims of war. The play by Euripides, was one of the first and most powerful anti-war plays ever written. As the title suggests, the playwright focuses on the most vulnerable victims of war rather than the classical heroic warriors. In that sense the play was ground-breaking at the time, and explains why Euripides did not win prizes at the great theatrical festivals in Athens. His tone was rather too subversive! After this surreal, and uncharacteristically upbeat opening to our interpretation of this timeless tragedy, the drama followed its relentless course, as the Trojans prepared to be deported as slaves by the conquering Greeks. I love watching theatre in the round because you can see every one else’s reaction in the audience. It’s not an easy play for sixth formers to sit through, with its long lamentations and breast-beating angst, but the hundred strong audience tuned into its brooding tone, as though appreciating a piece of late Beethoven! The applause at the end was thunderous! It’s extraordinary that a play written nearly two and a half millennia ago can still resonate with a large group of teenagers at the start of the 21st Century. Young men and women with iphones stuffed into skinny jeans, who rarely, if ever think about religion or politics, or the mystery of suffering, sat in rapt silence for an hour contemplating a world that was both utterly alien, and yet strangely all too familiar with its depiction of the fragility of human happiness, male subjugation of women, humanity’s attempts to make sense of devastating loss. I’ve no idea what this youthful audience may have taken away, other than a certain admiration for their heroic peers on the stage. Our souls are formed from myriad impressions stamped upon our psyche over a life-time. Art, whether through music, image or story often leaves the deepest traces even if we can’t always articulate it at the time. However, I believe the actors in the production have been profoundly affected by working on this play for the last few months. One of the great privileges of directing actors, is their intense receptivity towards you in the moments before a performance. They hang on your every word like soldiers going into battle. This is a pleasing contrast to their quality of attention in the classroom! Today, in the minutes before each of the three performances, we have spoken about huge themes and issues; about what it means to be human in any time or place. We have identified the heroism of the women in this play. Their endurance in the face of suffering, for example. We have discussed the nature of their loss. Loss of identity, of belonging, separation from loved ones, loss of basic freedoms. Enjoying these things, in any age, are what bring us joy, losing them shrivels our souls till we become husks of humanity. The actors who have spent the last three months embodying these truths will certainly take away something profound from this project, apart from a wonderful sense of achievement. The art of acting enables us to experience truth from the inside, as it were. It is to use Aristotle’s phrase cathartic, and thus transformative. I know of no healthier way to engage with the great spiritual themes of life than treading the boards in a play such as this. No wonder the ancient Greeks built huge theatres at the heart of their wonderfully progressive city states. These seventeen year old girls from privileged and relatively sheltered backgrounds have dug deep into their souls to empathize with women so far removed from their own circumstances. As they have done so, they have, albeit vicariously, felt what it’s like to be utterly powerless in the face of gross injustice, experienced the existential bewilderment of sudden and meaningless loss, and most importantly, the capacity of the human spirit to endure, come what may. I am sure they will look upon their fellow humanity, encountered on the news, or in the flesh, in a more compassionate light from now on. It’s time the churches and other institutions learnt a trick from the schools, and embraced drama as a core means of helping its members become more spiritually enlightened and socially integrated. As the great teacher Confucius said: 'I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand.' The Trojan Women is a perfect play for this season of Lent. It reads like the book of Jerhemiah or Lamentations from the Old Testament. It is a play which draws the audience into the bleakest wilderness and shows humanity stripped to its essence. All our illusions about civilized society are laid bare, and we are left like the Trojans, like Jerhemiah, to lament for a world that's lost its way.