In a flash of modern warfare, a mother loses her child, igniting a powerful one-woman journey through every iconic character in The Trojan Women. This reimagining of the world’s first anti-war play, originally staged in Athens in 415 BC as Euripides’ protest against the Peloponnesian War, combines intense drama with uplifting and comedic physical theatre at its best. With world politics as they currently stand, this 2000 year old story reflects a world all too familiar!
We sit down with playwright Sara Farrington to chat more about The Trojan Woman, playing at The King’s Head Theatre from 3rd-9th December. Buy your tickets here!
What inspired you to use a mother’s grief in the context of modern warfare as the central framing device for this retelling of The Trojan Women, and how did that choice shape your adaptation?
I didn’t want to do just another retelling of a play that’s been told a million times. There has to be an added value, a difference. I had to give it a reason, a task, an urgency that made it necessary to present again. So in the early days of the Russian war against Ukraine there was a photo first run in the New York Times that haunted me and became my impulse to frame the play. A mum, around my own age named Tetiana Perebyinis, and her two kids, Mykyta and Alisa, were killed as they fled on foot from their suburb of Irpin to Kyiv, where they were told to go. Times photographer Lynsey Addario captured the moment of their deaths and the image came to represent Russian brutality upon Ukrainian civilians. I just couldn’t believe how sad, how totally unnecessary, unbearable, their deaths were. In the photo, the colours of the coats popped to me, somehow rendering the image much worse. You can see their everyday preparations there, the pedestrian-ness, no different from you and me. So the play is framed by an act of modern warfare (which could be any war happening around the world today) where a mother may or may not have lost her child. In that flash of violence, time is compressed, and the mother performs The Trojan Women, the whole thing, all the characters. Once she gets through the entire play, she recognises what’s happened to her kid in real time. So there’s a modern magic in that structuring, too.
The play incorporates both biting satire and profound grief. How did you navigate the balance between these tones to ensure the message resonated emotionally while remaining accessible to contemporary audiences?
There has to be humour or else I’m just clobbering people over the head with my message of sadness and no one likes that, plus an audience can pick up what I’m putting down pretty quickly. Not fair to a captive audience. When I was a much younger theatre artist, I worked at The Wooster Group, an iconic experimental theatre company here in New York, and I learned something that has stuck with me for decades: It must be funny and it must be moving. “Funny” first, “moving” right there next to funny. In A Trojan Woman, the characterisations are often funny, yes, but I think the real humour comes in the shifts from one moment to another. There is no ceremony or gravitas between moments, something Drita nails really well. So, emotional residue from one character’s big moment doesn’t drag into the next—it can’t, only one person is doing it. There is something really funny (and true-to-life) about this. But there’s a tragedy living in those shifts too. Like a sort of—oh well, whatever, moving on.
I think Euripides is asking us across 2,400 years: What is the point? And we need to hear this message because in the last few years, society is slipping into this divisive, tribalistic behaviour, very acutely here in the US. Human beings seem to naturally slip into that tribalist mode and always have. In A Trojan Woman it’s Greeks versus Trojans, but of course the ancient Greeks had classes just like us—the rich, women, slaves, etc… I can only speak for the US, but right now it is (and has always been) the rich convincing the poor to tribalise, to actually listen to their divisive instinct. The rich are saying: go, go, be angry at each other, peasants. Keep in-fighting so you are distracted enough down there for us to keep control up here! So we can start wars and take stuff and kill people! It just happened in our election on November 5th, as the world saw. Our country listened. It’s awful. And we are human, so if we don’t fight that “us against them” instinct daily, if we don’t use critical thought, we keep ending up in the same place: at war. I mean, even in Euripides’ opening scene, it’s there: Poseidon and Athena, the gods, are literally arguing about how much or little they feel like caring about the humans down on earth. So I think the story of The Trojan Women, in a nutshell, is: What is the point? What are we doing? It doesn’t have to be this way.
Writing a piece for a single performer to embody such a vast array of characters must be challenging. How did you approach the dialogue and structure to ensure clarity and dynamism in this unique format?
I think the existential threat of show solos is radiating that theatrical mania—like, now I’m him, now I’m her, vocal change here, vocal change there! Plus, of course, keeping it all straight so it’s comprehensible and doesn’t sound like an unhinged rant. The unique thing about Drita’s performance in A Trojan Woman is that she is less performing and more possessed. It’s like she’s accomplishing this task of being a conduit for these iconic ancient characters. And to circle back to that idea of “shifts,” I am endlessly fascinated with how these character shifts function onstage. They can actually be very subtle, even in a solo show. And they can work like a live, physical edit, like in film. The simple way I wrote it lends itself to that, too. The language is simple, the characters are, too. The original is pretty complex, so it’s my job as a contemporary playwright to make sure all is understood.
You’ve described your adaptation as “wholly unacademic” and meant for audiences of all ages and backgrounds. What specific techniques or choices did you make to ensure the play is both deeply meaningful and universally engaging?
Definitely unacademic, delightfully unscholarly. I identify as an artist first and foremost, not an expert on the Greeks. I just love the ancient Greek plays. So if I’m going to interpret something as heavy as Euripides, it has to be in the contemporary vernacular, not in dusty, reverent-sounding language and pace. I actually believe that presenting the classic plays this way is a bit elitist and might drive people away. Euripides wrote for his audience’s ears and brains, as did Shakespeare, Molière, Chekhov, and as should we, at least if we want to send a powerful message home. So in A Trojan Woman, for example, the classic Greek Messenger is a customer service rep, which tracks with Euripides’ view of messengers, I think. This characterisation left me ample room for humour while also hitting home that icy quality of someone who’s “only doing their job.” My version of Poseidon is a casually depressed surfer dude/sea god lamenting the loss of Troy, his favourite resort town (which again, I am interpreting through Euripides’ creation of him as a fickle and sad character). The Chorus, represented here by two umbrellas, have a sort of naïve Hollywood starlet vibe and so on. Not to give too much away, but that’s the vibe throughout, and people have really been responding to it.