Tom Wright’s production of Troy at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre has been hailed as the best thing the company has produced in years: shocking, chilling, funny and often breathtakingly beautiful. The play reimagines Homer’s Iliad, the great primal myth of war, and folds in details from Aeschylus, Euripides and Virgil alongside Wright’s own inventions.
The production opens on an amphitheatre set where sand pours from above, lending a hazy, cinematic quality. Characters enter in costumes that blend ancient magnificence with Old Hollywood glamour. The story fixates on Cassandra (Elizabeth Blackmore), the Trojan princess cursed to foresee the future but never be believed. Her desperate attempts to warn her family of their fate become the silent scream of a crumbling world.
Key elements of the epic are excised or altered: Iphigenia willingly sacrifices herself to the gods; Helen’s face remains veiled throughout; and the Trojan horse is a giant black egg heaving with menace. Wright’s prose shifts from liturgical to commonplace with ease, undercutting intense emotion with levity.
Director Ian Michael maintains a delicate tonal balance, using anachronisms such as Cassandra wearing a Blondie T-shirt and carrying a recycled plastic bag emblazoned with the words “I Choose to Re-Use”. The production thrums with dangerous vitality, enhanced by Paul Jackson’s dynamic lighting and Rosalind Hall’s strange, primordial soundscape.
The cast, including Danny Ball as Achilles and Apollo, Lyndon Watts as Patroclus, and Mark Leonard Winter as Hector and Agamemnon, deliver wonderful, sardonic performances. Troy is a grounded piece of epic theatre that fringes the divine, and a monumental success for Malthouse.
