The Women of Troy

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 792, 24 September 1954, Page 30

The Women of Troy

"SYBIL THORNDIKE repeated once again as Hecuba a role which suits her better, perhaps, than any other in radio." That is what the critic of the Manchester Guardian wrote about the World Theatre version of Euripides’ The Women of Troy when it was broadcast first by the BBC. He said some other complimentary things, too — that Philip Vellacott’s translation of the play was "good for radio, clear, and easy to take in when listening," and that Raymond Raikes’s production was "clearly

| defined and sharp." This is the production which will be heard from 3YC at 9.30 p.m. on Saturday, _ October 2. The siege and capture of Troy took place about 800 years before The Women of Troy was written, but the Greeks who first saw it nevertheless still lived jn a world of wars and sieges. Three years before the play appeared the Athenians had attacked the small island of Melos and killed all the male inhabitants. sold the women and children as slaves, and colonised

the pla:e for their own population. This was the kind of behaviour for which they despised Orientals, and in this play the deed they had sent their army to perform 50 miles away was presented to their eyes, Introducing the World Theatre production in the Radio Times, Mr. Vellacott said that like so much of Euripides’ work the play invites his audience above all else to question their habitual assumptions: the infallibility of admired characters, the wickedness of the. traditional Scapegoat, the justice and necessity of any given war, the rightness of a national cause, the reliability of the unseen world. In this version both writ.

ing and production bring out the analogy between the plight of the captive Trojan women and that of thousands of Jewish women in concentration camps during the Second World War. Apart from Sybil Thorndike, the principal players in The Women of Troy are Ralph Truman as Poseidon, Marjorie Westbury as Cassandra, Rachel Gurney as Andromache, Anthony Jacobs as Menelaus and Margaret Rawlings as Helen of Troy.