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After Troy
Troy is in ruins. Its men are dead. Its women are captives and the victorious Greeks are camped in the ashes preparing to sail home. Four quarrelling women drawn together by grief… Four exhausted soldiers who hate each other’s guts… A King who falls for a girl so mad she can see the audience… A teenage princess dreaming of the Underworld… And a lonely man of conscience trying to get it all down on paper…
Award-winning poet and playwright Glyn Maxwell rips up two Greek tragedies and makes a modern play from the fragments. A witty and passionate retelling of Euripides’ Women Of Troy and Hecuba, After Troy exposes the cruelties of war both then and now.
Award-winning poet and playwright Glyn Maxwell rips up two Greek tragedies and makes a modern play from the fragments. A witty and passionate retelling of Euripides’ Women Of Troy and Hecuba, After Troy exposes the cruelties of war both then and now.
92 pages, Paperback
First published October 18, 2011
16 people want to read
About the author
Glyn Maxwell
52 books46 followersGlyn Maxwell is a poet and playwright. He has also written novels, opera libretti, screenplay and criticism.
His nine volumes of poetry include The Breakage, Hide Now, and Pluto, all of which were shortlisted for either the Forward or T. S. Eliot Prizes, and The Nerve, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was one of the original ‘New Generation Poets’ in 1993, along with Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy and Don Paterson. His poetry has been published in the USA since 2000. His Selected Poems, One Thousand Nights and Counting, was published on both sides of the Atlantic in 2011. He has a long association with Derek Walcott, who taught him in Boston in the late 1980s, and whose Selected Poems he edited in 2014.
On Poetry, a guidebook for the general reader, was published by Oberon in their Masters Series in 2012. It was described by Hugo Williams in The Spectator as ‘a modern classic’ and by Adam Newey in The Guardian as ‘the best book about poetry I’ve ever read.’
Fifteen of Maxwell’s plays have been staged in London and New York, including Liberty at Shakespeare’s Globe, The Lifeblood at Riverside Studios, and The Only Girl in the World at the Arcola, as well as work at the Almeida, Theatre 503, Oxford Playhouse, the Hen and Chickens, and RADA. He has written extensively for the Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre in Chester.
His opera libretti include The Firework Maker’s Daughter (composer David Bruce) which was shortlisted for ‘Best New Opera’ at the Oliviers in 2014, Seven Angels (Luke Bedford) inspired by Paradise Lost, and The Lion’s Face (Elena Langer), a study of dementia. All of these were staged at the Royal Opera House and toured the UK.
He is currently working on a screen adaptation of Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle for the Dutch director Clara Van Gool.
His nine volumes of poetry include The Breakage, Hide Now, and Pluto, all of which were shortlisted for either the Forward or T. S. Eliot Prizes, and The Nerve, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was one of the original ‘New Generation Poets’ in 1993, along with Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy and Don Paterson. His poetry has been published in the USA since 2000. His Selected Poems, One Thousand Nights and Counting, was published on both sides of the Atlantic in 2011. He has a long association with Derek Walcott, who taught him in Boston in the late 1980s, and whose Selected Poems he edited in 2014.
On Poetry, a guidebook for the general reader, was published by Oberon in their Masters Series in 2012. It was described by Hugo Williams in The Spectator as ‘a modern classic’ and by Adam Newey in The Guardian as ‘the best book about poetry I’ve ever read.’
Fifteen of Maxwell’s plays have been staged in London and New York, including Liberty at Shakespeare’s Globe, The Lifeblood at Riverside Studios, and The Only Girl in the World at the Arcola, as well as work at the Almeida, Theatre 503, Oxford Playhouse, the Hen and Chickens, and RADA. He has written extensively for the Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre in Chester.
His opera libretti include The Firework Maker’s Daughter (composer David Bruce) which was shortlisted for ‘Best New Opera’ at the Oliviers in 2014, Seven Angels (Luke Bedford) inspired by Paradise Lost, and The Lion’s Face (Elena Langer), a study of dementia. All of these were staged at the Royal Opera House and toured the UK.
He is currently working on a screen adaptation of Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle for the Dutch director Clara Van Gool.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 24, 2019
This is a very stylized retelling of the myth of Hecuba's final days--it's closest predecessor in ancient Athenian drama is Euripides' Trojan Women, though Maxwell has introduced significant changes making it clear that this is not Euripides' version. The Greeks are cast in a much darker light, not necessarily in the sense that they're more violent, but in the sense that they lack any real empathy or diplomatic ability to understand others. Though Kratos--the guard responsible for the women--does drug them at night and then allows Mestor (who doesn't appear in the Euripides version) to molest the unconscious women, so there is definitely some more brutality that we don't get in Euripides. Mestor is an interesting addition to the play. In mythology, Polymestor was entrusted with the youngest son of Priam and Hecuba, but when the Trojans lost the war he threw the boy into the ocean. Here Mestor is a barbarian, whose mind seems to operate on a very simple level and who has a rather confused and primitive theology. But Maxwell generally follows the outline of the myth because Hecuba (with Agamemnon's secret help) lures Mestor and his children to where she is being held, then the captive women (in this case lead by Cassandra) murder his sons and then Cassandra and Hecuba blind Mestor. It's an interesting divergence from the Euripides version because it gives Hecuba back some agency. Although she isn't able to control her fate or to really avenge Troy's destruction, she can exact retribution for her youngest child's brutal killing.
March 17, 2017
This is an interesting exercise: the combining of two plays from the same playwright about the same time and character to create a new piece of theater. It makes sense and there are moments where you say "yes! this is why we are here!" But at least on the page far too much of it feels academic and without urgency, which is exactly what makes the original pieces soar when done right.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews