I’ll just be brief, as I’m late seeing this show. It’s got one week left and I feel like encouraging people to go, for the simple reason that there are several performances by some of our best female actors in this production that are well worth seeing, and one in particular that is heartbreakingly good. As it’s running past the Fringe Festival dates, the show could suffer from the Fringe box office no longer being open. Tickets can be bought here.

I have problems with the show – it’s far from perfect. The challenges in producing and sustaining such high-intensity tragedy are immense. I felt numbed at the beginning, in the vast wasteland of the set, with the onslought of declaimed verse, and the difficulty lay for me in bringing an audience from a cold start to the blistering heat of maddening grief without enough preparation; it was like being penetrated too quickly, without lubrication. To a large extent, this is a limitation of the form, and all modern productions of ancient Greek tragedies have this mountain to climb.

And yet, when I’m moved by performances, as I was last night, to tears, I have to acknowledge that the context for such emotion has been solid enough for some magic to happen. The less stylized the speech, the more colloquial and natural the speaking voice, the more I was engaged; I feel that some of the cast were a bit daunted by the text, and I don’t blame them. When actors let the text rule them, I’m cold, for I do not revere the spoken word as many others do; but when they take charge and wrestle the words to serve their own emotional needs, I wake up, take notice, feel connected. I first started to warm up when Mary McEvoy’s blunt heartiness overcame the form and the formality, and punched her pain through to me. From then on the bleak costs of war became heartrendingly visceral, as the women of the ruined city of Troy came to terms with the savage demands of the Greeks in victory. Once I was tuned in, each woman had her turn to impress, and Brendan Kennelly’s earthy reworking of Euripedes’ ancient story seemed to become richer and darker and more resonant. In a commanding performance, Deirdra Morris as Hecuba tracked a subtle path to majestic emotional power, leaving her blasted against the wall, crawling on the ground, and wading toward us in an unforgettable climax. Impressively, in Leigh Arnold, there is an accomplished actor capable of carrying the charisma, beauty, and sexuality of Helen herself, the cause, unwitting or knowing, of the carnage and pain all around her.

For me, however, the highlight of the evening was Catherine Byrne as Andromache; I was wiping my tears away at the end of her first aria; spoken naturally, seemingly effortlessly, with a deep intelligence. As she was hunched on the ground with grief, her back being rubbed by mourners keening in a stirring African way (a really successful element of this production) I felt deeply, deeply impressed.