Trojan Women Rebecca Southern

There are a few things that are different from the book to the play. First, the chorus in the play was one man. In the original, the chorus is a woman and the voice of all captive trojan women. Also in the performance Andromache kills her own son because Talthybius says that he was ordered to kill him. She killed him out of love before Talthybius gets the chance to throw him off the cliff. In the text, Talthybius actually goes through with the murder. I think that Andromache does the killing in the play because it draws the audience in more. It is a much powerful statement to have the mother kill her own child than have the child murdered.

I thought that the performance highlighted Helen and her speech about why Menelaus should not kill her. In the book, this was a semi-long passage, but it did not stand out to me like it did in the play. In contrast, Cassandra’s speech about being taken away was very long in the book, but she did not have a long speech in the play. I think that the passages that the performance highlighted were the ones that I found important. The performance also highlighted the killing of Adromache’s baby. Although the exact story of what happened differed from the book to the play, the importance of it was still emphasized in the performance that we saw. Hecuba’s intense hatred of Helen was emphasized in both the play and the book. Menelaus’ response to Hecuba when she urges him not to take Helen back on the same ship of, “Has she put on weight since I saw her last?” (67) was the same in both the play and the text; it made me laugh in both settings.

Lighting was used a lot throughout the show. The lights would get darker or lighter depending on the mood. The themes of lightening and flames that I noticed while reading the text were played up in the performance by the dramatic changes in lights for different scenes.

The characters of Hecuba and Cassandra were very different from what I expected, but Helen and Andromache were portrayed similar to what I imagined. The fact that Cassandra was Asian and that she had an accent really threw me off. It didn’t really make sense because it did not seem possible for her to be related to Hecuba at all. In addition, she was more childish than I envisioned her to be. In the performance she was running around and jumping on tables-- acting more like a child than I imagined. But I think this depiction helped me understand Cassandra’s character. Her anxiety to get married and leave home was more clear to me in the play than in the text. Hecuba was also a character that was depicted differently than I imagined. I did not think of her as so angry and sickly looking. In the play, her makeup and speaking voice made her emotions more powerful. I was a little creeped out by her. In the text it simply states, “Hecuba faints” and this did not really have much meaning to me. But, I can still distinctly remember her fainting in the performance. I think the director made Hecuba so dramatic to really emphasize how she was feeling inside. Her family members were being taken from her and she was being taken from the city where she was once queen. Her emotions were very heavy and this was played up in the performance.

The fact that the play was outdoors went along with how it would have been performed in Ancient Greece. The chorus was in the background a lot, and his actions were only noticed if the audience member was really paying attention. I noticed him throughout the play, moving from the main stage, to back by the violin player, and to the balcony. In each of these locations, he was mirroring the actions of the character that was speaking. For example, when Hecuba was giving a speech near the beginning, I saw that his arms were moving in the same way that hers were; he was like a shadow for her. The stacked chairs on stage right confused me a little and I am not sure their significance. The chairs were in a weird formation that I did not understand. There was minimal use of props in the performance.