The Trojan Women

Wednesday. 12pm. The Green Room. We have been in rehearsal for two hours already and will rehearse for five hours more. I sit at one end of the room, partially obscured by an enormous bass drum (best not to ask), and I think. Silence fills the room as we all sit, stare into space, and think: what should happen next in this scene, who should say which line, what is the right thing to do? Silence. The air tingles with brain-waves before we remind ourselves – we should not think, we should do! Nothing comes from silence. If any member of the company has an idea as to the direction that the scene should take then we try it out. It may be brilliant, it may not but we try it. We play games and we tell stories.

In these two hours we have already sailed the seas and attended a wedding feast, even though neither of these things actually take place in Euripides’ The Trojan Women. To say that this is an off-script exercise would be an understatement – there is no script. We have opted against the use of Euripides’ original text in favour of a modern, exciting form of story-telling: one that grows organically with each new rehearsal. We take Euripides’ story (powerful, moving and unflinching against the test of time) and find a new way to tell it. We strip the story down to its bare essentials before building it back up again. Spoken word mingles with movement and music in this exciting, theatrical re-imagining of a classic. There can be no single authority on how to tell this story because stories are shared: the very talented ensemble takes creative ownership. In the meantime, whilst we wait for more ideas to germinate, we continue to play games and tell stories.

Jack Cooper.

Director, Trojan Women.

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