STRATFORD — Every reimagining of a classic tale begins with a proposition.
What if the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good, from “The Wizard of Oz,” were actually best friends in their youth? asked the creators of the Broadway juggernaut “Wicked.”
What if there was more in store after “happily ever after” for those Brothers Grimm fairy tale characters? mused James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the musical “Into the Woods.”
In “Ransacking Troy,” now receiving its world premiere at the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre, the guiding proposition is as such: What if the wives and daughters of those Greek men who went off to fight in the Trojan War grew so tired of the protracted, 10-year conflict that they set off to Troy to put an end to the fighting once and for all?
It’s certainly a thought-provoking and completely original idea — essentially a feminist reimagining of both Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” told over two acts and nearly two hours and 45 minutes.
Ambitious? No kidding.
Yet then again, we’ve come to expect nothing less from Erin Shields, the Canadian playwright who flipped heaven and hell on their heads in a bold retelling of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and who challenged Shakespeare with a prequel to “King Lear,” told from the perspective of the titular monarch’s evil daughters (or so we all thought).
“Ransacking Troy” fits firmly in the same vein as those previous works. But while, like those other plays, this show begins with a compelling kernel of an idea, it doesn’t quite deliver in its execution, hurtling toward a towering climax in its first half before losing much of that momentum after intermission.
In director Jackie Maxwell’s solid production, nine actors play a multitude of characters from the Homeric epics: women, men, gods and mythical creatures. With a quick change of costume (designed by Judith Bowden) or a change of the intonation in their voice, Maxwell’s cast switches between these characters with clarity and ease.
Shields’s play, however, mostly centres on two of them: Penelope and Clytemnestra. It’s the former, wife of the war hero Odysseus, who initially hatches the plan to rally the women of Greece, sail to Troy and intervene in the war. Headstrong and obstinate (and portrayed as such by the commanding Maev Beaty), she’s sick of passively waiting on the sidelines and having to entertain the boatload of suitors just waiting to marry her should Odysseus perish in battle.
Clytemnestra (an excellent Irene Poole), meanwhile, queen of Mycenae and wife of the military commander King Agamemnon, is initially reluctant to sign up for this epic journey. She believes that such an endeavour would only lead to failure.
But she’s eventually convinced to go by her daughter, Electra (Helen Belay), and the unyielding Penelope. Perhaps, they argue, Clytemnestra will finally get the opportunity to confront her husband over his decision to sacrifice their daughter to the gods at the start of the war.
The first act of “Ransacking Troy” mostly takes place contemporaneously to the events of “The Iliad,” set during the tail end of the Trojan War. While the men are locked in a war of attrition, the women are sailing off to Troy, using a boat that was abandoned by their husbands. And as they do so, battling the turbulent seas and their own self-doubt, they formulate their plan to put a peaceful end to the conflict.
Many of the scenes in this act are humorous, even bordering on sheer silliness. One involving the women teaching each other how to disguise themselves as men, including how to scratch themselves in some very particular places, as men do, elicited howls of laughter from the opening night audience.
But Shields manages to skilfully balance these moments of levity with other, more serious moments in her play: As these women embark on their journey, they have frank discussions, too, about their society’s power structures, the patriarchy, and what it looks like to create meaningful, lasting change.
“Ransacking Troy,” however, hits some rough waters in its second act. I won’t spoil what the women’s peace plan exactly entails, and how they try to get the Greek men on board. But when this plan is revealed to the audience, just before intermission, anyone with even an elementary knowledge of the Homeric epics would know that Penelope and her crew have severely overestimated their husbands’ willingness to offer their adversaries an olive branch.
This creates a sort of dramatic irony between the audience and the characters on stage. We know how this is all going to end; the women don’t. But instead of creating a sense of tension, this reveal at the end of Act 1 sucks all the suspense out of the story.
Because of that, the play’s second act, somewhat mirroring the events of “The Odyssey” as it follows the women on their journey back to Greece, largely stumbles toward its conclusion.
There is one exception, however: midway through Act 2 is the play’s strongest scene, in which the wives-turned-warriors share their hopes, dreams and anxieties of a women-led society. Here, Shields’s writing takes on an almost Shavian-like quality — dense, verbose and dipping into the philosophical.
But the rest of this latter half feels frustratingly episodic, with the Greeks overcoming a series of challenges on their return journey home. (The show is really begging to be turned into a TV series, where its secondary characters could be better developed.) Another issue: there are also far too many scenes of the women rowing their boat.
Maxwell’s production is ideal for the Tom Patterson Theatre, with an elongated thrust stage that resembles the bow of a ship. And in the second act, Michael Walton’s lighting designs conjure everything from terrible tempests to mythical beasts. But these convincing production elements still can’t make up for Shields’s wobbly narrative.
Most perplexing is how she chooses to end her play. Up until that point, Shields does a fine job of fitting her story within the universe of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” But in her final scene, she brings back a character who cannot conceivably appear at that moment. It makes the show’s conclusion feel, somewhat, like a deus ex machina cop out.
“Ransacking Troy” certainly holds much promise. It’s born out of a creative and compelling idea. And it features a starry cast, all mining deep into the material to produce some terrific performances. Shields’s play, however, needs far more dramaturgical work, particularly in its second half. Right now, the product on stage at the Stratford Festival feels like a ship that has launched with speed, then quickly loses the wind in its sails.
