'"The Trojan Women"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 430, 19 September 1947, Page 8

'"The Trojan Women"

STRANGE that even at the first or second remove from actuality of a radio recording the old unhappy far-off things should have so much potency; that we should be able to weep for a Hecuba the pauses in whose lament are filled with the faint sibilance of a gramophone needle, to recoil from the horror of the destruction of Troy when we know this roar of flames and this crashing of masonry are but proofs of the effects-man’s virtuosity. Art is long, and The Trojan Women is for all time. It is amazing how little one misses the distractions of the stage performance. The text (Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation) becomes all-important, and the exquisite rightness of the words and rhythms satisfies a sense grown super-sensitive through the exclusion of the visual faculty. The familiarity of the story too exerts its spell, but Euripidean magic has transformed mythological heroines into women, women human enough to prefer dishonour to death, and not above wasting precious almost-last words on abuse of their fellow-unfortunate, Helen, she whose face was "a dark desire upon all Greece." But even the Word, by Murray out of Euripides, cannot prevail without the human voice to make it flesh. In the BBC’s World Theatre presentation, heard recently from 2YA, Sybil Thorndyke as Hecuba, and Rita Williams as Andromache give life to Euripides’s poetry and immediacy to his drama.