Review: Helen, Lace Market Theatre
THIS is Greek tragedy for sure, but it's more up-beat than others you can name. It's eighty minutes without an interval but they never drag.
The protagonist Helen of Troy, re-surfaced in Egypt, is a victim of her own beauty, as were all those recently perished in a Trojan War which it turns out was futile - we are all playthings of arbitrary and capricious gods. But it is, as well, a love story with an essentially happy resolution.
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Helen director Cynthia Marsh
Director, Cynthia Marsh, gives us an inventive studio production. Helen is played in turn by five performers, each of whom takes it in turns to don a single mask. Except, that is, right at the start, when Helen appears naturalistically but everyone else wears his/her own individualised but unrealistically grotesque mask.
Amanda Hodgson (Theonoe), Matthew Swan (Menelaos) and Chris Roberts, as a Messenger, give particularly pleasing performances: they deliver their lines with clarity, understanding and conviction.
Initial dialogue in each scene is done in Ancient Greek; elsewhere it's a vigorous translation, much of which rhymes, sometimes deliberately comically.
After two and a half millennia this play raises contemporary concerns about pointless war-making and the distinction between private person and public persona.
ALAN GEARY







Comments
by Rich Lovely, LMT Tech
Thursday, July 02 2009, 5:01PM
“That picture isn't Cynthia... It's Charlotte, one of the actors.”