The war of Troy is over. The Greeks have won, not by valour, but by a foul trick. For ten long years they besieged the city of Troy, but could not go beyond its impregnable walls, for these were built by two powerful immortals, the Sun God Apollo and the God of the High Seas, Poseidon. So they duped the Trojans into accepting a huge wooden horse as a token oftheir submission, which the Trojans themselves hauled inside the city walls in their elation as a symbol of victory. The nightlong celebrations left the Trojans tired and unsteady, and then the Greeks struck, for there were soldiers hidden inside the horse. Troy was swept clean of all its men in one night.
And now only the women are left, including those of the royal household. Queen Hecabe, wife of King Priam, mother to the gallant warrior Hector, the handsome Paris, the innocent Polyxena and the seer priestess Cassandra, is distraught in her grief. The Greeks, led by King Agamemnon , had struck Troy when Paris eloped with the gorgeous Helen, wife of the Greek king, Menelaus . Now their vengeance is complete, with the women of Troy beingmeted out to the Greeks as concubines, servants and paramours, and even the last male, the infant son of Hector and his wife Andromach, being killed.The God Poseidon and the Goddess Athene have plotted to wipe out the Greeks in a tornado after they sail for home . The Greeks are under the sentence of death, but before retribution descends on them, they make it clear, by their various outrages, how much they deserve it. They are doomed from the start, and proceed to pile up the count before our eyes. On the other hand, we are at a loss to understand how the Trojan women, whohave led their lives as per the moral tenets of society, have deserved their terrible fate. Do we then see that nothing the individual can do can have meaning in a world on the brink of annihilation for reasons and by means that the individual is unable to grasp and over which he appears to have no control?
In Tomari Matir Kanya, based on The Trojan Women of Euripides, staged in 2002, we decided to emphatically state that this is NOT a play about the plight of women in times of war. This is about the plight of human beings in times of war. This is NOT a play about thedefeat of a country. This is about the death of a civilization . This is about the loss of freedom and dignity, and ultimately about the loss of faith in all that is good and sacred.
Credits –
Lights – Badal Das
Music - Saswati Biswas
Stage – Khaled Choudhury
Translation – Salil Bandyopadhyay
Costume and Direction – Saswati Biswas
Cast -
Poseidon – Asim Sen
Athena- Jagori Bandyopadhyay
Hecabe – Alokananda Bhattacharya
Chorus – Bisnupriya Basak, Jagori Bandyopadhyay, Soma Kar, Arundhati Chakraborty, Saswati Biswas
Cassandra – Tania Banerjee
Andromache – Senjuti RoyMukhupadhyay
Talthibius - Dhrubajyoti Das
Guard – Asim Sen
The Telegraph March 21,2003
The Hindu March 16,2003
