THE TROJAN WOMEN

By Brendan Kennelly 

For this production City Theatre Dublin reopened the performance space at Smock Alley Dublin - It had fallen into total disuse, and was waiting to be rescued having failed as "viking village tourist attraction".The Floor was mud left over from the Viking Village and we re-opened the space for live theatre since its closure in 1787.


We called it THE EMPTY SPACE @ Smock Alley, installed 10 tons of new clean mud and some mobile seating. I asked Jean Guy Lecat, Peter Brooks designer and technician to advise me on it.


Smock Alley Theatre, was the first custom built theatre in Dublin City and still remains in substantially the same form, making it one of the most important sites in European theatre history.
 
Smock Alley Theatre, was the first theatre outside London to receive the title of Theatre Royal, but, because it had been built on land reclaimed from the Liffey, the building was unstable and the gallery collapsed twice. It was rebuilt in 1735. The theatre closed in 1787. The building was then used as a whiskey store until Father Michael Blake bought it to set up a church. When the bell tolled in 1811, 18 years before the Catholic Emancipation, the first Catholic bell to ring in Dublin in nearly 300 years was heard. The façade boasts ornate stained glass windows and the original ceiling plasterwork remain in the Smock Alley as a witness of this time.The Theatre Royal at Smock Alley gave the world the plays of George Farquhar (The Recruiting Officer), Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The Rivals). 300 people attended the theatre each night, seven days a week to be enthralled, entertained and enlightened by actors, acrobats, dancers, musicians and trapeze artists.


A note about the play

Like all other Greek plays, The Trojan Women was written for performance to an entirely male audience by an all male cast. In giving voice and visibility to women, Euripides is typically radical, typically iconoclastic and typically perverse.


Brendan Kennelly’s version of The Trojan Women marks at once an arrival from a great Greek text and a departure from it. Revoiced in an immediate, pungent vernacular, Kennelly gets to the heart of a play which is about loss on such a such a scale that few of us can imagine it, about a grief so profound that we pray never to witness it--let alone experience it--and about a rage so incandescent that we can only aspire to it.


The play’s title reminded Kennelly of women in his own north Kerry who were known locally as “trojans”, enduring lives of unbelievable misery, hardship, degradation and abuse at the hands of their own menfolk.


In The Trojan Women, Hecuba witnesses the anguish of women whose suffering is matched today by countless women caught up in wars across the world. She comes to see that their fate, far from representing “collateral damage” is actually the true object of war in itself. The Trojan War was not about a woman so much as a war on women and womanhood.


But devastation brings strength, a new sense of herself and her power. Her reaction is straightforward enough: if you prick us, shall we not bleed and if you wrong us, shall we not be revenged? 



Michael McCaffery 

Company Dramaturg


CAST:(in order of appearance)


PALLAS ATHENA (Godess)  

IMMACULATE AKELLO 


POSEIDON (God of the Sea) 

MAL WHYTE


HECUBA (Widow of King Priam, 

Mother of Hector and Paris) 

DEIRDRA MORRIS


TALTHYIBUS - (A Greek Herald) 

PETER GAYNOR


CHORUS 

MARY MCEVOY


CASSANDRA (Prophetess, daughter of Hecuba)  

MAUREEN  

O CONNELL


ANDROMACHE (Widow of Hector) 

CATHERINE BYRNE

 

WOMAN

SARAH PATIENCE NAHEME


MENALAUS (King Of Sparta)

LENNY HAYDEN 


HELEN (Wife of Menelaus)

LEIGH ARNOLD


ASTANYX (Son to Hector)

BEN MIDDLETON or

JACK LEAVEY


SOLDIERS

GREG RIMMEL

SEAMUS BRENNEN





Creatives


Directed By

MICHAEL SCOTT


Costumes Designed by

SYNAN O MAHONY


Space Consultant

JEAN GUY LECAT


Technical Director

BRIAN TRACY


Stage Manager
FEARGA O DOHERTY


The Production was founded by a "Once Off Grant" by  The Arts Council  /An Comhairle Ealaion




SPECIAL THANKS TO:


John O Keefe (Architects),

Paul Bourke, 

Jim Myers 

Gallowglas Theatre Company,

Dara Connolly (TBP) 

Michael McCaffery,

John Conroy 

Theo Devaney,

Myra Geraghty 

Ciaran MacGonigal 

Ciaran Tracy, 

Siobhan Bourke 

Jane Daly

Hector & Gus 

Paddy Farrell 

Keith Brunkard 


and 

Mary Cloake (for listening) 



City Theatre Dublin

Board


AUTHOR


BRENDAN KENNELLY


Born 1936, is Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin. He won the AE Memorial Prize for Poetry and the Critics Special Harvey's Award.


Kennelly’s attitude to poetic language could be summed up in the title of one of his epic poems, “Poetry my Arse”. Another long (400 page) epic poem, “The Book of Judas”,(1991), topped the Irish bestseller list. He has more than twenty books of poems to his credit, including :


My Dark Fathers (1964), Collection One: Getting Up Early (1966), Good Souls to Survive (1967), Dream of a Black Fox (1968), Love Cry (1972), The Voices (1973), Shelley in Dublin (1974), A Kind of Trust (1975), Islandman (1977), A Small Light (1979) and The House That Jack Didn’t Build (1982). He is also the author of two novels, “The Crooked Cross” (1963) and “The Florentines” (1967), and three plays in a Greek Trilogy,Antigone, Medea and The Trojan Women 


A fluent Irish speaker, Language is important in his work – in particular the vernacular of the small and isolated communities in North Kerry where he grew up, and of the Dublin streets and pubs where he became both roamer and raconteur for many years. Kennelly’s language is also grounded in the Irish-language poetic tradition.

 


Kennelly has commented on his own use of language: “Poetry is an attempt to cut through the effects of deadening familiarity and repeated, mechanical usage in order to unleash that profound vitality, to reveal that inner sparkle. In the beginning was the Word. In the end will be the Word…language is a human miracle always in danger of drowning in a sea of familiarity.


Sadly Brendan passed away in 2021