Damning war the Euripides way

It was written two and a half millenia ago but it still carries as powerful an anti-war punch as anything written since. Don Taylor's version of Euripides' The Women of Troy, set in an industrial port of a war-torn city, gets the full treatment at the National. It comes complete with spectacular pyrotechnics, compelling dream sequences and a dead baby Astyanax, thrown from the battlements lest he grow up to avenge his father Hector, so grimly realistic that you wondered whether he wasn't a real child specially murdered for the occasion.

But there was one aspect of the performance that I saw last night that added an extra layer to the realism quotient. This was the fact that half the cast had clearly been laid low by the nasty little bug that has inflicted itself upon much of the country, including myself, in recent weeks.

Kate Duchene, playing Hecuba, the widow of King Priam of Troy and mother of Hector, was clearly in real physical distress as well as acting out the stage variety with a feverish intensity, finishing one harrowing scene in which she is manhandled by the Greek herald Talthybius with long lines of snot hanging from her nose. Sinead Matthews, as her daughter Cassandra, was as hoarse as you might expect of someone who has been fated to foretell the future but forever remain unbelieved. The cups of water and handkerchiefs and hands on shoulders and other sympathy on offer from the other women in the cast were not just for stage effect.

It all added to the power of the performance: a harrowing tour de force that damns war through the experience of the women left behind rather than mythologising it through the tales of heroes. According to Aristotle, Sophocles said, 'I portray men as they ought to be, and Euripides portrays them as they are.' No bad thing.