While the Almeida's spent the summer giving us radical rewrites of Greek classics,
the RSC has cut Euripides out of the picture altogether and, in what would probably
have been a more accurate description of
Icke's Oresteia and
Cusk's Medea as well,
commissioned Marina Carr to write an entirely new play based on the legend - in this
case, that of
Hecuba. There's a lot of dead children in this story too but
Hecuba (Derbhle Crotty) isn't as okay with this as Medea: A mother of eighteen and
the former queen of Troy, as the play begins the city has just been taken after ten
years of war, and she's not yet quite understood the "former" part of her title. The
Greeks have demanded that no male Trojans be left alive, and as most of her children
were sons, she sits in her throne room surrounded by their dismembered bodies.
Taking comfort from her two remaining children, she stands up to the triumphant
Agamemnon (Ray Fearon.)
