ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates adaptations of Euripides’ most unconventional tragedy of female woe and bereavement, The Trojan Women. It begins with a brief overview of the extensive traditional body of scholarship which has developed surrounding Euripides’ play, and also briefly mentions its performance history before proceeding with a close analysis of Charles Mee’s Trojan Women: A Love Story, Kaite O’Reilly’s Peeling and Christine Evans’ Trojan Barbie. Initially the author offers her own reading of the original text which does not intend to question the more traditional, well-established approaches to The Trojan Women, or attempt to project contemporary theatrical interpretations onto the classical text. It provocatively evidences an inherent radicality, and demonstrates the tradition of the play’s conservative interpretation which is subsequently challenged by the radical re-makings which are then analysed. These re-makings are used as case studies to demonstrate the palimpsestic nature of contemporary theatrical adaptation and its definition as “hypertheatre”, while re-inventing The Trojan Women in the contemporary moment. In this chapter the author demonstrates how this play, which has been adapted in numerous situations of war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has been re-invented as more than an anti-war narrative. It has been re-made in form and content to give its female protagonists power in the battles that they face as individual women who are victimised within certain social stereotypes.
