One thing it leaves me wondering though is quite how much such a production makes the play about the director. All Stephen’s comments are really about how clever all the directoral tricks were. I think that says it all really. Especially given that the tricks are to the text what a clever op ed illustration is to a great work of art. Pleasingly clever but not much more.

I found most of the tricks irritating – and in a sense detracting from their implicit purpose – nothing like understatement or a small detail to get across horror. I recall some of the most compelling passages in Primo Levi’s description of life in Auschwitz were the small details – some description of some simple routine that would bring home the simple facticity of what was being described.

That having been said, I must say that as op ed tricks go – the speaker hanging from the roof from which the instructions were emitted was very well done.

If I was to consider it, the staging was quite interesting and contemporising it with references to Abu Ghraib and disturbingly anonymising the Greek soldiers behind bank-robber masks – provided an eary resonance about the faceless enactation of authority that actually rendered the women’s with more authority. In this I though the disembodied voice upon which the Greek orders were communicated (the voice like a cross between the ferocity of a Nazi commandant and the banality of the voice from Big Brother) was an interesting mechanism to convey the banality of evil of a victorious army ignorant of the universal laws of decency it had transgressed.

And also Kosky was able to utilise his experience as an opera director to good affect, which did add to the atmospherics, even if it did venture a little bit in its music vocabulary into the realm of the kitsch. And as your previous commentator mentioned having Aeneas appear upon an electric wheelchair did communicate the inevitable impotence of his authority.

Yet I thought the play was let down by combining the three women’s roles (Cassandra/Andromache/Helen) into one part, which was both confusing for the audience and tended to diminish the role these women were to play in the performance. As it is through this device – which tended to project that these three varying women spoke with one common voice that I think left Hecuba with a greater obligation to convey her story. Also I thought the performance of Cassandra was hysterically overplayed – it should have been possible to have depicted the madness (a madness afflicted by the Gods in seeing the future madness of mankind) in a manner that didn’t parody Linda Blair from the Exorcist. And while a certain degree of animalism may have conveyed this – I thought the exaggerated performance of Cassandra tended to district from the central affliction of the character in that the audience through focusing on the histrionics was largely unaware of Cassandra’s tragic role as seer – cursed to foresee the future and to be repeatedly ignored by those she would forewarn. And without this I think it downplayed the larger symmetry that is at play in Euripides – that of foreshadowing how the madness of the gods would play out in the lives of the intersecting lives of the victorious Greeks and the vanquished Trojans. Its just a shame we were not given more of the womans’ stories, as Kosky’s pyrotechnics did tend to overwhelm the essential humanity of the play.

Nick, I saw the Women of Troy on Saturday night and, like you, at about the thirty-minute mark I felt I could have walked out. I dont get the chance to see much live theatre, so for my fifty dollars worth I generally like something a bit more uplifting. But I persevered, and was glad I did. After that point there was nothing as egregiously confronting as Cassandras rape; Robyn Nevin was given more monologues which she delivered superbly; and there were the Kosky touches which I quite liked: Aeneas appeared as a distinguished but cold and bitter older man on a motorised wheelchair; Helen wrapped up in sunglasses and black coat like a hounded celebrity. And the music interludes were an entrancing and welcome distraction: although to say that a chorus singing Greek dirges provided light relief gives some indication of the bleakness of the rest of the plays content.

Ive seen good and bad and indifferent productions from Kosky. The first was in 1988, when as a precocious first- or second-year undergraduate at Melbourne University he got together student actors and musicians from the surrounding colleges to put on a season of Don Giovanni. Well, I mean to say, really! But although it was (inevitably) a bit ragged around the edges, the exuberance of the performance, the innovativeness of the staging, the fact that it was in English, and that this was the first opera performance Id ever seen, it won me over completely.

Several years later he did Marriage of Figaro for a professional opera company, which I also enjoyed, although I recall the then Age opera critic bagged it unmercilessly, probably because the chorus wore baseball caps or something.

I saw the King Lear, too. I thought it compelling as much for John Bells Lear as Koskys production; as I found Women of Troy compelling because of Robyn Nevins performance. I recall the bleak scene I think youre referring to: a Channel ferry terminal? Or outpatients at a public hospital? You cant get much bleaker than the latter. But as Lear descended into madness, things became increasingly frenetic, with people running around madly. I wondered then why he decided to portray madness as frenetic activity. I guess thats where we get the word frenzy from. And as you note, he did similarly with Cassandras rat-a-tat-tat speech and epileptic convulsions. But I thought maybe he could, for a change, show madness as a terrifying stillness or absence.

As for Women of Troy, it was the monologues and music – the theatrical experience -that ultimately made me think about the violence portrayed in a way that was different from our normal engagement with violent imagery. When I arrived home, the babysitter was midway through some ABCTV police drama where a policeman was being beaten and kicked to death by a gang wielding baseball bats but then I suppose no one had paid fifty dollars to see it.

Anyway, Nick, Ill see you at Billy Elliot.