Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy review – Michelle Dockery and Laura Aikman in a play that takes on the world

Thanks to 1536, her coruscating play about three women in Tudor England, Ava Pickett is flavour of the month. Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy indicates she might be flavour of the year and many years to come.

Written before 1536, this play which sees Helen return from the war to contemporary Essex, is full of spit, fire and brilliance. It’s like Sarah Kane crossed with The Only Way is Essex – devastatingly funny but utterly furious about the state of the world and the way that women within it are treated.

In this telling of the story, Helen, played with high-wire intensity by Michelle Dockery, never actually leaves the country. She goes out to the pub, meets Paris and runs off with him. Her husband Marcus (as in Menelaus) and his brother Mario (for whom read Agamemnon) are so furious by this exercise of free-will, that they plunge Britain into civil war into their attempt to get him back.

The first character we meet, on Polly Sullivan’s clever set with its white sofas, fake Greek mouldings and cream carpets surrounded by the suggestion of the waste of war (a stark tree branch overhead, a leaf-filled arena in front), is Ethan Moorhouse’s messenger, who, in a compelling combination of slang and verse, fills the choric function of commenting on the action. “Zeus created Essex,” he announces as he begins the tale.

Moorehouse has previously worked with Charli XCX and his delivery is visceral, painting a picture of a land where a woman’s “no” is “a violent thing” that can tear the world apart. In his mouth, Pickett’s words fizz and spark, as she conjures a world controlled by the gods of love and war – “Aphrodite’s best when you’ve got the drinks in” and “Aries is a c***y little god, always spoiling for a fight.”

But she is also exploring the present day. Paris was a foreigner and Mario’s urge to bring her back has triggered a backlash where outsiders are being attacked and killed by raging mobs, with an uncomfortable resemblance to those appearing in English coastal towns at the moment. “It started small, a little stab, a little fight, a little bit of petrol bombing lighting up the night / But soon Mario… started claiming that this wasn’t about Helen, this was about f***ing, f***ing, f***ing England.”

This combination of warlike, of men seeing themselves as heroic defenders of their land, and the down-to-earth world of women and their lives, finds its expression as Helen, blood-spattered and traumatised, arrives in the living room of Cee (Laura Aikman), in high red heels and a tightly fighting white dress, who has bought champagne and prepared some mozzarella on sticks for her former best friend’s return.

The collision is brilliantly funny. Cee’s instinct to play the welcoming hostess is at constant odds with the intrusion of shock and awe into her immaculate living room. There’s a marvellous moment when Helen’s pregnant daughter Hermione turns up, seeking to discover something about the mother who abandoned her ten years previously. As emotions rise and accusations spiral, Cee suddenly asks, “Would you like a Lucozade?”, and Aikman perfectly captures the woman’s mixture of concern, confusion and dawning understanding. She is touching when she describes the loss of her own daughter, Lydia (standing in for Homer’s Iphigenia) who has been killed in the conflict.

The action as it unfolds – as the women challenge their patriarchal, violent husbands – is genuinely dramatic, taking surprising twists and providing real shocks, underpinned by Nicola T Chang’s sound design, and tightly directed by Lisa Spirling.

Dockery is gripping as Helen, aware of her beauty, furious at her treatment and there are satisfyingly complex performances from Maimuna Memon as Dani, a cleaner who is not quite what she seems (“I’m not paying her wages,” snipes Cee) and from Emma Monnickendam’s wounded Hermione who is hauntingly damaged by events that have unfolded around her.

But the true glory of Bloodsport is that it confirms Pickett’s bold, confident instincts as a writer. The tension and cleverness of its conception never falters, and the words rise like a sword taking on the world.