“The Trojans: A Visually Stunning Production with Some Flaws”

29. April 2023. White is innocence and decadence, red is suffering, blood and anger. The Trojan palace on the stage is all in white. Luck still reigns just before the Greeks invade with the wooden horse.

The staging of Euripides’ unfortunate “Trojans”, who are enslaved, raped and robbed of their children by the Greeks, is divided into three parts by director Lucia Bihler, the first two of which take place simultaneously.

Half of the spectators are allowed to walk directly through the palace walls onto the stage. In this bizarre, highly aesthetic, ice-clouded installation, we are very close to the well-to-do, thoughtless, luxurious everyday life of Troy before destruction, it could easily be our own: a rumpled bed. Chessmen, in the middle of the game. A bread in the oven, white crab chips to share. A mother blow-drying her little daughter’s hair in the bathroom. A breakfast table with a sandwich and an egg (even the yellow one is whitewashed). Giggling, Andromache (Paulina Alpen) reads her husband Hektor the latest gossip while she cradles her doomed baby Astyanax – from Helena and Paris, or the latest absurd predictions of Cassandra. Loud laughter. Shortly before that, the mother (Birgit Walter) was upset about her pubescent sons at the same table.

Troy before the fall

In each of the sterile ghost rooms of everyday life, separated by white fabric walls, are blurred family photos, because we are looking into a destroyed past: Troy no longer exists. A ritual pond with milky water sloshes in the middle of the installation. Mnemosyne, the river of memory? Lethe, the river of oblivion? Silver globes float on it. Paper boats, folded by a little girl, sink. Individual spectators are blessed, standing around it we all sing a low note. Sometimes the light flickers, an ominous sound booms into the spherical music, everyone utters a piercing scream, the water turns blood red. As if by magic, the six Trojan women are suddenly dressed in red in all the white.

Veiled in decline: the women of Troy © Tommy Hetzel

And then our group of visitors is already led into the theater hall, where headphones are waiting at the seat. From here you can only see through a narrow door to the interior of the palace and the ghostly spectators who wander through it. Once Helena poses with white leggings and a mobile phone chain and kisses her Paris before they disappear from view again. Kassandra (Alina Heipe) is sitting in front of us on stage, wrapped in a huge red tulle robe (costumes: Ran Chai Bar-Zvi), only her mouth is projected onto the wall in a giant way, you can see the position of her teeth and every thread of spit. It is that mouth that speaks but is never heard. Now he whispers pathetic snippets of language from John von Düffel’s adaptation of Euripides into the audience’s ear, sometimes repeating himself: “Today is the last happy day”. Or: “This must have been Troy”.

Again and again Kassandra calls for her mother, describes the Greeks as snarling hordes of rats or a dream in which she herself becomes a dog, we hear her suffering and her anger before at some point her eyes are also shown. All of this is aesthetically overwhelming in any case, but linguistically almost annoyingly reduced, there is no trace of the constraints of the unheard seer. And why is Cassandra looking at us so seductively after telling us all this? Because women “have learned that their lives depend on the favor of patriarchal power,” as Franziska Schutzbach (“The Exhausted Women”) describes in the program booklet? In any case, it seems irritating, with all the fragments of the most brutal sad count.

Women degraded to trophies of the Greeks

And then the third part begins, with all the spectators taking their seats and looking at the palace from above (stage: Wolfgang Menardi). The walls thunder down and destroy the sterile, super-aestheticized beauty – the Greeks here seem more like an earthquake, a natural disaster. And the women do what they always do: They hug, anoint, wash the dead men, process the catastrophe eagerly, docilely and resiliently. It takes a while and will be a bit long.

Wolfgang Menardi’s stage in Depot 1 of the Cologne Theater © Tommy Hetzel

The girl Polyxene hides under the table with the last heir to the throne, a few moments later she is also dead. pull up skirts and down cleavages, pose on pedestals. Andromache also hands over the baby to the Greeks, who come in in black battle gear, weeping but docile. And even after the worst suffering, shortly before the rich women from Troy are shipped off individually to slavery, they of course still clean everything up: women, collaborators of male power. They’re not Killjoys, they play along. And when cleaning up, we still find the red tulle robes that Kassandra wore in the first part, half hijab, half evening dress.

Technology beats content

In the end they stay with Lucia Bihler, most grandiosely veiled, just not isolated decoratively standing on their pedestals, but come together in a community and to their voice, call themselves hyenas and bitches: “You are the anger, mother. She is the Future” – is the last sentence, freely adapted from Audrey Lorde.

But this evening is so overwhelmingly over-aesthetic, so grandiosely artful its pictures in red and white, so powerful and empowering at the end its final message: It was grasped too quickly. Lucia Bihler wanted the body to “overwrite the material”, thereby repeatedly revealing the inner contradictions of women’s lives – and yet almost doing away with the language and complexity of the material. In the end, that doesn’t quite work: too much technology for so little content.

Those Troerines
after Euripides
Edited by John von Düffel
Director: Lucia Bihler, stage: Wolfgang Menardi, costumes: Ran Chai Bar-Zvi, composition, sound design, video: Jacob Suske, lighting: Jürgen Kapitein, dramaturgy: Sarah Lorenz.
With: Paulina Alpen, Alina Heipe, Yvon Jansen, Lola Klamroth, Monika Oschek, Birgit Walter.
Premiere am 28. April 2023
Duration: 2 hours 20 minutes, no break

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