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(More customer reviews)Ancient Greek plays with all their dramatic devices and often an emphasis on static speeches by the actors and the chorus often do not translate well to the screen. Euripides' "The Trojan Women," however, is an exception to the rule. What makes this production work is the fine acting by most of the performers as well as the beautiful language, though in translation, of Euripides.
The plot is simple and straight forward. Queen Hecuba (Katharine Hepburn), her now crazed daughter Cassandra (Genevieve Bujold), her daughter-in-law Andromache (Vanessa Redgrave) and a host of other Trojan women are now at the mercy of the Greek victors. The play builds as one catastrophe after another befalls these women. Cassanda will be the wife of Agammemnon, Andromache will go with the son of Achilles, and Hecuba will become the slave of Odysseus-- or as Hecuba so aptly puts it, "Anguish heaped upon anguish."
The Greek chorus-- or in this instance I suppose we must call them the "Trojan Chorus" works well. Irene Papas plays a different sort of Helen than we see through other writers' eyes. Here she is unbowed, even as she awaits her fate from the hands of her wronged husband Menelaus. In a quite wonderful scene, after Helen has made her pitch to him to spare her life, Hecuba delivers the great lines: "Kill her, Menelaus." Ms. Hepburn has a lot of such passages. I remember from having seen the movie when it was released in 1971 her lines: "Kindness unwanted is unkindness."
The theme is obvious. Wars always hurt the women and children most-- Andromache's son almost steals the movie, by the way-- and while the weaponry and locales may change, war in 2005 is not that much different than it ever was, a sad, sobering thought.
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