The Trojan Women

This production of The Trojan Women is the first work of the newly-created Compagnia Teatrale Europea founded this year by the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia and the CSS Teatro stabile di innovazione del FVG to bring young professionals from EU countries together on the same stage.

This production of The Trojan Women is the first work of the newly-created Compagnia Teatrale Europea founded this year by the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia and the CSS Teatro stabile di innovazione del FVG to bring young professionals from EU countries together on the same stage. The company springs from the experience of the Ecole des Maîtres and Projet Thierry Salmon projects, advanced theatre training courses directed by Franco Quadri and promoted by theatres of Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. The network of theatres and national and European institutions that promoted those training projects supported Napoli Teatro Festival’s Compagnia Teatrale Europea project and made available its experience and European grounding. In its first year, the company has gathered a troupe of 12 actors and works under the direction of Annalisa Bianco and Virginio Liberti.
The Trojan Women premières on 6 June 2008, inaugurating the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia.
In The Trojan Women, Euripides depicts the pain and grief that are an inevitable consequence of war. Troy is ablaze in its dying hours: the Trojan princesses and Queen Hecuba await to be shared as booty among the Greek commanders and sent into slavery. In front of the black ships, at dawn, after a tragic night, they compare their glorious past with their present grief and terrible future. They mourn for their dead and for the atrocious death that will befall Astyanax, son of Hector and Andromache, destined to be thrown from the walls so that Troy shall never rise again. This is war seen through the eyes of the vanquished. Together with the Queen, who is always on stage, the scene is dominated by the very diverse female characters of the three princesses, Cassandra, Andromache and Helen.
 
This staging of The Trojan Women does not give in to the illusion of being able to journey back in time or retrieve a strained modernity in the Greek text, which, say the directors, is dead and very distant from us today. Rather, Euripides’ tragedy asserts a violent realism, it presents the stories and suffering of our times, of modern-day barbarities such as war, violence on women and children, the hunger of the defeated. Bianco and Liberti’s production also indicates guidelines for future, practical reflections on the scope for Tragedy today: “We are interested in the tragedy of a community, the descent into the depths of the human suffering that has no name, no history, like the people who die every day in Darfur, on the streets of Iraq or in the massacres perpetrated in Rwanda. Tragic works are not a cultural thing but a true tale of horrors. Tragedy as an endless conflict without solution. As a death machine for the cunning of reason. As an antidote to the indifference towards other people’s suffering”.

Annalisa Bianco and Virginio Liberti are the founders and directors of the Egumteatro company established in Milan in 1994. In 1998 they moved to the province of Siena where they became heavily involved in theatre work in the region. As part of Egumteatro, they created a dramaturgy award, held seminars for professional actors and mounted plays with dialect theatre groups, junior school pupils and former long-term mental patients. They also produced the Quaderni di Teatro di Egum (“Egum’s Theatre Exercise Books”) containing unpublished interviews with leading European directors. They won the G. Bertoloucci award for young theatre troupes, in 1998. In 2002 they became the art directors of the Amiata Festival, a festival of folk arts held in August in the municipalities of the Amiata area in the province of Siena. They won the Lo Straniero award 2005 for the theatre category, and the Riccione-Aldo Trionfo award in 2007 for the plays produced with Egumteatro. They have staged works by Molière, Rilke, Ostroviskj, Michel De Ghelderode,  Kafka,  Weedekind, Heiner Müller, Copi, Koltès and Fassbinder. The Trojan Women by Euripides for Napoli Teatro Festival Italia is their first  production outside Egumteatro.