With a sly wink, Ava Pickett’s early play, drafted before she went on to write 1536, wrangles another slice of history into a drama that resonates loudly in the days of Reform and Restore, except this time she replays her chosen plot in the present day. Modern England has emerged from a civil war, but the final reckonings are yet to be made. At the centre of the piece is the Trojan War, but not as we know it. This civil conflict has raged in towns like Preston, and its base is in Essex.
The scenario Pickett has devised shouldn’t work; in fact, it raises one too many questions to be wholly successful, notably: who has been fighting this civil war? On one side is tattooed, bearded, shaven-headed Mario (Agamemnon, played by Gerard Monaco, pictured below with Jay Taylor), who seems to have stepped straight out of the manosphere, though his brother Marcus (Menelaus, played by Jay Taylor) is more standard-wimpish. Paris, who is allowed to keep his name, was guilty of stealing Marcus’s wife Helen (Michelle Dockery) after they met down the pub, but exactly who Paris and Helen’s followers were isn’t spelled out. Feminists? Metrosexual liberals? The conflict is apparently over, except it definitely isn’t, any more than the story of the Trojan War ended with the sacking of Troy.
What’s new here is that, now alone, with Paris butchered by Mario and his men, Helen has raised a monstrous regiment of women to take their revenge on them, and bullying men in general, for their animalistic cruelty and subjugation of their womenfolk. She has returned home hoping her sister Cee (Clytemnaestra, played by Laura Aikman), Mario’s wife, will take up arms alongside her, spurred on by the murder of her daughter Lydia (Iphigenia). Cee, though, is much more worried about getting stains on her nice cream carpet. In fact, the ladies in Helen’s squad debate where to execute Mario et al, opting for just a shallow stab wound for the armed guard he leaves at his house when he and Marcus go out, to minimise the mess.
Somehow, Pickett keeps this tricky vehicle on the road, which juggles its serious issues with a dark, absurdist humour. One woman in the squad decides she has to go home to her children, but not before complimenting Cee on "what she's done with the bathroom". Uninterested in home decorating, Helen is revealed as a distant mother, whose pregnant daughter Hermione (Emma Monnickendam) bitterly resents her for this. Most of the characters speak as if they are in a reality TV show about Essex lifestyles, the exceptions being the intense, fiery Helen, her second-in-command Dani (Maimuna Memon, pictured below) and the Messenger (Ethan Moorhouse), a man of the people who acts as a Chorus, summing up the woes of contemporary Albion with heightened, near-poetic diction, and lots of swearing. There are Greek gods presiding over this territory, but increasingly the mortals seem to be operating as rogue agents, especially the women in Helen’s camp.
Saying too much about the plot Pickett has come up with, and how it radically deviates from its Ancient Greek sources, will spoil the surprises that regularly punctuate the action, right up to the last minute. Best just to say that in Dani the piece posits the emergence of a new breed of tough-girl who has icy steel in her veins, neither a stay-at-home mother nor a woman whose lodestar is experiencing passionate love. And the play also comments on the knee-jerk violence of misinformed people, like the angry band of men who broke into a hotel where they believed Helen was hiding, and found Lydia there instead.
Much has been made of the homecoming of Agamemnon, Simon Stone’s theatrical recasting/updating of the story in The Oresteia being just the most recent. But the homecoming of Helen has not had the same attraction for dramatists, ancient or modern, maybe because one version of her story is that she was whisked off to Egypt by the gods and never went to Troy, another that she was happily reunited with Menelaus, neither of these storylines a strong selling point. On the big screen, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey recently returned Helen home as visibly damaged goods. But Pickett has done something new, trying to imagine her as an ordinary, though beautiful, wife, beset by the quotidian issues that face the average married woman. Her sister Cee is no political animal but is arguably more worldly, a cynic about the durability of marriage and more sensitive to popular opinion.
These two characters draw impressive performances from Aikman and Dockery, though the latter sometimes talks at too low a volume to reach the back of the stalls. She’s like something out of the TV crime series Widows, a seemingly cool, dangerous customer who’s no stranger to wielding a weapon, whereas Cee could have stepped out of a Stefan Goleszewski comedy, a little doll in a white dress and scarlet shoes who has opted for marriage and being safe. (Pickett adds an extra ingredient, to explain Mario’s exceptional hatred of his sister-in-law, the “slut-demon” he rages about to his followers.) In very rough terms, the sisters represent Peace and War.
Director Lisa Spirling, on whose desk the first draft of this play landed when she was artistic director at Theatre503, has given it a tight, atmospheric production with great sound design (by Nicola T Chang) that heralds each act with a flurry of gunfire and human mayhem. It’s tense in between bouts of black comedy, and in need of tightening when the dialogue starts to meander. But this is an evening unlike anything else onstage right now.
