“The Trojan Women”
Of the production of The Trojan Women of Euripides by The Little Theatre Company, at the Blackstone Theatre, Sunday, April 11th, one might waste many, many words and much good space. One might make merry over the quaint little mannikins trying their hardest to look like Spartan soldiers. Or again, a whole column might be devoted to the insipid posturings of the saintly-pretty lady who played Helen. Much sarcasm might be expended on the flops done, in the approved French-tragedy style, by the lady who played Andromache. A whole thesis might be written by an enterprising student at some correspondence school on the use of the Vaudeville Spotlight in Classic Greek Tragedy. And Hamlet’s advice to the players might be quoted with some profit to a few of the company: pointed emphasis at the “do not mouth your words” part of the advice, to the lady who speaks the speech beginning:
Lo, yonder ships: I ne’er set foot on one,
But tales and pictures tell, when over them
Breaketh a storm not all too strong to stem,
Each man strives hard, the tiller gripped, the mast
Manned, the hull baled, to face it, till at last
Too strong breaks the o’erwhelming sea: lo, then
They cease, and yield them up as broken men
To fate and the wild waters.
And last of all one might say unkind things about the blending of the voices in the chorus.
All the above points, however, I know are very debatable. There are two that cannot be debated. Two that outbalance by far all the other defects of the production.
If all the cast had voices like corncrakes, and used them after the manner of country-town amateurs, the production would still be worth seeing for the thrilling pictures of colour and line presented by individuals and the ensemble. And rising, soaring away above all the petty little defects is the wonderful, majestical verse of Euripides. What could be more beautiful than the lyric:
Even as the sound of a song
Left by the way, but long
Remembered, a tune of tears
Falling where no man hears,
In the old house as rain,
For things loved of yore:
But the dead hath lost his pain
And weeps no more.
It is greatly to be regretted that it has been thought fit to cut that lyric, Cassandra’s Hymn to Hymen, and many of the other beautiful parts of the play.
The whole thing might have been better in a hundred ways—then again it might have been worse in ten hundred ways. Let us be glad that we had an opportunity of seeing the wonderful thing, even though the Carnegie Peace Foundation is backing it up.
D.