The Trojan Women: A Comic
... dramatizes the suffering of the women of Troy after the city’s defeat by the Greeks. The play’s reputation has created a subterranean impact ... This tragedy’s monumental standing makes Carson’s decision to rewrite it as 'A Comic' (the subtitle) provocative and risky.
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It’s a joy to come across a mistress of the art taking rumbustious pleasure in revisiting the matter of poetry itself ... Simultaneously straight-talking and experimental, the Canadian has been reclaiming the classical tradition as an essential resource since the 1980s ... her writing remains as fierce as ever. At this #MeToo moment protesting against the objectification of women, her Trojan women are drawn as literally animal, the spoils of war ... Carson’s purposeful play bypasses nostalgia for the kind of traditional forms on display in another creative revisioning.
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For me, Bruno’s strange, crude, and somehow completely evocative images do what acting can’t. Carson’s adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone, Antigonick (2012), was in its original manifestation an art book illustrated by Bianca Stone; as successful a presentation as that was, this is even more splendid. In any case, if we can have both the words and images, why not? And if we can have almost all of Euripides’s words of Trojan Women and all of its spirit rendered by the premier adaptor-translator of the Greek tragedies (if not our best classically Greek-inspired poet) and see it maskless without having to go to the local amphitheater, why not?
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