Reviews

Passions. A Study Around Trojan Women (international tour – Colchester)

Anne Morley-Priestman

The starting point for Passions. A Study Around Trojan Women is the tragedy by Euripides. This tells the story of the women of King Priam’s house after the city has fallen to the Greeks and they become the property of the various victorious commanders. But you don’t have to be familiar with the play or the stories which inspired it to know that the victims of any conflict are going to be predominantly the women and children of the vanquished.

What we see unfolds in movement and in music. The latter is provided for the most part by Vito De Lorenzi, master of a ferocious array of percussion instruments, though the women of the cast also contribute song in a variety of languages. What other words are spoken (mainly by Vladimir Tuliev) are mainly in Italian. Giorgia Maddamma’s movement owes much to eastern European and Mediterranean folk dance filtered through Nijinsky.

As the white-clad women shift across the stage, they step forward in turn to present us with a hint of their stories. Loss – husband, lover, father, mother, child – is a universal experience and its expression is something which in its emotion transcends boundaries of place and time.

Alina Czyzewska, Tanya Gigova, Antonella Iallorenzi, Gina Isaac and Mariarosaria Ponzetta may come from different countries, but Salvatore Tramacere’s direction unifies them in a committed performance which now travels on to Skopje )Macedonia), Pazardzhik (Bulgaria) and Legnica (Poland). It premiered at Lecce in Italy.