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| Caroline Bird |
My play, The Trojan Women, is now into the fifth week of its run at The Gate Theatre. And we are doing well: reviews have been good and audiences sufficiently harrowed and entertained by turns. I am very proud of the part my script has played in the production – because, of course, the script is only a ‘part,’ a set of instructions: like a deflated bouncy castle in a box. Everyone else (the director, the cast, sound, lighting and costume designers, production team etc) does the inflating, and the jumping.
It is a radical new version of Euripides’ tragedy, set in the Mother and Baby unit of a prison. The ‘Chorus’ is one pregnant woman handcuffed to the bed (‘A pregnant woman is a Trojan Horse,’) and the setting is modern but not specified. There are water-dispensers, iPhones, condoms and Scrabble boards, but this is also a land ruled over by Gods, ancient hierarchies and the fierce belief in the power of ceremony. I wanted to create a current, mythical world; for the audience to feel, just for ninety minutes, The Trojan War as a contemporary experience. Obviously this is a war involving a huge wooden horse so already we are operating within a context of hyper-realism, and the play embraces this, at the same time as aiming to present these iconic characters – Hecuba, Cassandra, Helen of Troy – as new people, living now, still trapped inside the same story.
Chorus – But I remember, ten years ago, when I was a teenager, buying a magazine with them on the cover. Fairy-tale romance. Helen Dazzles In Jewels. Paris and Helen Attend Charity Gala.
Hecuba – She ensnared the media.
Cassandra – What are you talking about? You fucking loved her. She arrived and three weeks later, you had me locked up.
Hecuba – That’s because you were cutting yourself.
Cassandra – I told Daddy if he didn’t give Helen back to Greece, they would invade. You had me sectioned.
Hecuba – You were nine and you thought you were a prophet.
Cassandra – I am a prophet!
For me, the main similarity between writing poetry and plays is the treatment of subtext. In a scene, dialogue is always a process of dancing around the truth. Very rarely do people say exactly what they feel. Or even know what that is. In fact, sometimes characters deliberately make huge, grand statements to avoid a small, quiet emotion. Similarly, in a poem, there are the white spaces between the lines. The images. You can approach a subject from the side-door: the truth of the poem may be about hurt and rejection, but this is never mentioned, instead the subject matter is the face of a dog, or a hat-stand. The truth is hidden, like the word written down the centre of a stick of rock. Or the soldiers in the horse.
The Trojan Women is published by Oberon, and the show runs until 19th December at The Gate Theatre in Notting Hill.
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| Watering Can |