If you’re looking to cast the role of
Helen of Troy, you might as well quit faffing around and go straight
for a supermodel. Lily Cole has been the most successful of her catwalk
contemporaries in crossing over to acting, and her first sustained
stage role mirrors the ability she has shown on screen. Her low-key
delivery comes from deliberation rather than diffidence, portraying a
Helen who is simply exhausted after a decade of being the incarnate
reason for the Trojan War.
Simon Armitage’s treatment of Homer’s
Iliad
(plus relevant parts of the
Odyssey
and Virgil’s
Aeneid) runs the
gamut of linguistic and emotional registers. Helen’s fatigue contrasts
with the inexhaustible passions of Jake Fairbrother as the mercurial
Achilles; the self-regard of Greek commander Agamemnon (David Birrell)
is clearly less vital to the Hellenic side than the stratagems of
Odysseus (Colin Tierney, his forward thinking symbolised in that he is
the only one wearing thoroughly modern dress). These distinctions
coalesce in the single figure of Richard Bremmer’s Zeus, who in
classical mode is as imperious as they come but who also metamorphoses
into a shabby present-day huckster offering disillusioned hindsight on
these 3000-odd-year-old mythological events.
Armitage and director Nick Bagnall resist the temptation to play up
resonances with contemporary wars. What they show are universal motifs:
factional struggles, the ignorance of command, hollow rhetoric and so
forth, and among the Trojans the competing impulses of martial
romanticism, peace-seeking self-delusion and growing despair. With a
cast of just over a dozen there can be no all-encompassing battles, but
Kevin McCurdy both choreographs the big routines and directs the
one-on-one fights with an impressive originality: the Trojan Hector’s
tussles with Patroclus and then Achilles himself are thrilling
sequences.
The Royal Exchange’s in-the-round configuration makes it impossible to
bring on any credibly sized wooden horse, and the final battle itself
is a significant absence: we cut from the emergence of the Greeks out
of a large wooden drum (standing for the horse) to a resigned
commentary by Zeus and Hera, to the departure of the victorious Greeks
having left the city of Troy empty of life and property alike, and
significantly having failed to properly replenish their own sense of
identity. We know, as they do not, what is to come. In fact, what is to
come in a few weeks is the stage version of Derek Walcott’s poetic
refraction of these legends,
Omeros,
at Shakespeare’s Globe…
Written for the Financial
Times.