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.

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