A Greek tragedy stripped to its bones

There is no programme note explaining the concept. No projected timeline of ancient Greece. Instead, you walk into a cold, narrow space that smells faintly of disinfectant. A chain-link fence divides the audience from a bare concrete floor. Fluorescent tubes flicker overhead. This is not a museum piece. This is a holding centre, a camp, a waiting room for the damned. And Euripides’ The Trojan Women – here pared back to a lean 80 minutes – has never felt so close to home.

The adaptation, by a young playwright who clearly trusts the original’s bones, removes the gods almost entirely. Poseidon and Athena are gone. What remains is the human cost: the women of a fallen city, handed out as prizes, waiting to learn their fate. The chorus is no longer a group of mournful citizens. They are asylum seekers, refugees, the displaced. They wear tracksuits and donated coats. They clutch phones with dying batteries. They speak in the clipped, overlapping rhythms of people who have learnt to give nothing away.

The chorus as a political weapon

In most productions, the chorus is a problem. They stand and intone. They comment. Here, they are the engine. The director has them move as a single organism, then splinter into individuals. One woman whispers a name. Another repeats it. Soon the whole group is chanting a list – not of Trojan heroes, but of modern cities reduced to rubble. Aleppo. Mariupol. Khartoum. The effect is not clever. It is gutting.

What makes this chorus so potent is its restraint. There is no breast-beating. No wailing for the sake of it. The women sit on plastic chairs. They fold laundry. They queue for water from a single tap. Their grief is in the small things: a broken hairclip, a child’s shoe, a phone that will never charge again. When they finally raise their voices, it feels earned. And when they fall silent, you could hear a pin drop in the stalls.

A set that traps and liberates

The design is ruthlessly practical. A single shipping container serves as a cell, a bed, a morgue. The lighting is fluorescent and unforgiving. There is no interval, no escape. The sound design – a low hum of generators, a distant siren, the occasional drone – never lets you forget where you are. Yet within this bleakness, there is invention. A strip light becomes a moon. A bucket of water becomes a sea. The production understands that Greek tragedy works best when the audience has to fill in the gaps.

One sequence, in which the women wash the body of a dead child, uses nothing but a flannel and a plastic bowl. It is the most devastating scene I have seen on a stage this year. No blood. No music. Just the slow, deliberate act of care. This is theatre that trusts its audience.

Performances that burn with quiet fury

The actor playing Hecuba – the fallen queen – gives a performance of extraordinary control. She does not weep until the final ten minutes, and when she does, it is not a release but a collapse. Her voice, throughout, is a low rasp, as if she has been shouting for weeks. Opposite her, the actor playing Cassandra is a live wire, all spitting anger and bleak humour. Her scene, in which she predicts the future with a laugh that curdles into a sob, is a masterclass in tonal shift.

The supporting cast, many of them making their professional debuts, are uniformly excellent. The chorus work is tight, never showy. A single gesture – a hand on a shoulder, a shared glance – carries more weight than any monologue. There is no weak link. Even the silent roles, the guards and the aid workers, are fully present. You believe in this world, and that is the hardest thing to achieve.

The politics of now, without preaching

This is a political play, but it never tells you how to vote. It does not mention any real conflict by name. It does not need to. The parallels are obvious: the arbitrary detention, the family separations, the bureaucratic cruelty. But the production refuses to reduce its characters to symbols. These women are not saints. They are petty, jealous, exhausted. They steal from each other. They snap at children. That is what makes their suffering unbearable.

In one of the most chilling moments, a representative of the victorious army – a bland, smiling man in a lanyard – explains that the women will be “processed”. The word hangs in the air. We have all heard it before. The play does not shout. It simply holds up a mirror. And for a UK audience, sitting in a cold studio in east London, that mirror is uncomfortably close.

Why this production matters

It is not perfect. The second half sags slightly, and one or two of the choral passages could be trimmed. But these are minor quibbles. What this production achieves is rare: it makes a 2,500-year-old text feel like breaking news. It is fierce, political, and deeply moving. It runs for 80 minutes without an interval, and you will leave feeling wrung out, but also strangely grateful. Grateful that theatre can still do this. Grateful that someone had the nerve to strip away the marble and show us the blood.

If you can get a ticket – and they are going fast – go. Take a friend. Take a tissue. But most of all, take your attention. This is not a history lesson. It is a warning. And it is one of the most urgent pieces of theatre you will see all year.