In this era when women’s rights and voices face renewed challenges around the globe, Stratford Festival’s Ransacking Troy arrives with a striking blend of timeliness and timelessness. Playwright Erin Shields’ feisty re-platforming of Homer’s ancient epics The Iliad and The Odyssey excavates the feminist perspective from the fringes of mythology, unleashing a rollicking adventure story that is equal parts escapist revisionism and mournfully defiant meditation.
A mythological Justice League
Like an ancient mythological Justice League, the play brings together an unlikely band of heroic women, whose stories have long languished in the margins of masculine heroic verse. At the center are the two best-known Greek queens. The first is Penelope, famous for fending off suitors and other male tribulations as the long-suffering wife of the resourceful Odysseus, whose cursed 10-year journey home from Troy is told in The Odyssey. After a decade of bloodshed, Penelope realizes the Trojan War must end, and the only ones with the wisdom to make that happen are the women who were left behind, and have built a better, more just world in the absence of their warmongering husbands. Maev Beaty’s Penelope is inspiringly blunt and brash: a straight-shooting strategist who channels her urgency through a calculus that is equal parts aspiration, perception and inventiveness.
The second heroic principal is Clytemnestra, best known as the wife and eventual murderer of King Agamemnon. As the philandering leader of the Greek army, his flaws — arrogance, anger, moral blindness and lack of accountability — are central to The Iliad. Clytemnestra is Penelope’s first, most reluctant recruit — because she is a mourning mother gripped by grief and rage which have justifiably simmered since the war’s start. Irene Poole plays her tightly wound and riven by emotion. “I’ll kill him!’ she spits, when told of Agamemnon’s antics at Troy. If you know your Greek mythology, you know this is a promise, not some empty exclamation.
These two legendary queens – like Superman and Batman – provide opposing emotional cores for an ensemble that gives voice to the full spectrum of female experience in the ancient world — with each carrying their own weight of untold history. Yanna McIntosh brings gravitas and complexity to her role as Queen Eurydice, wife of Nestor, eldest of the Greek Kings; while Helen Belay’s portrayal of Clytemnestra’s daughter Electra carries the fire and passionate conviction of youth.
The other five heroes, though minor, are in some ways the most interesting: because their fates are not already documented in myth, they bring vital energy and uncertainty to the narrative. Sarah Dodd’s Galax, half-sister of Greek warrior Ajax, adds a perspective on warrior culture from within a prominent military family; while Caitlyn MacInnes brings working-class authenticity, grit and sensuality to new character Cur, the boat-builder’s daughter. Marissa Orjalo’s Hermione, Helen of Troy’s teenage daughter, provides a poignant lens on the generational impact of war. And finally, Ijeoma Emesowum provides a welcome comic turn as the minor and occasionally helpful sea goddess Psamathe, while Sara Topham’s Queen Aegiale rounds out the ensemble as a languorous and sexually adventurous hedonist.
Fertile ground for fun and fury
Shields’ true genius lies not in creating something from whole modern cloth and planting it backwards into the landscape of Homeric epic, but in cracking open critiques that are already present in the source material. The Iliad juxtaposes scenes of glory in war with the wreckage and grief they cause. Set in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War, the poem pointedly ends prior to the Greek victory, with the funeral of Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior.
Similarly, while in the end Odysseus wreaks violent retribution on his rivals and reinstates the patriarchal order, The Odyssey over and over again stages boastful aggression, predation and the silencing of women as destructive male behaviour, and valorizes self-control and cunning. Working atop this fertile ground and building her new narrative in its gaps and silences, Shields delivers more than a simple feminist re-telling. She turns over every stone of the familiar narrative and blows visible embers beneath into the flames of alternate truths.
A big part of this involves turning Homer’s critiques up to 11, in order to take the piss out of the men, and reconsider some of the women. In flashback conversations, remembered sexual acts, and even scenes after they arrive in Troy, the actors playing the queens also play their husbands. In gruff voices, bawdy words and body language, they skewer male pretensions with gleeful abandon and a precision born from necessary observation and expected deference.
Expanding the scope of female experience to encompass the perspective of the war’s eventual losers, McIntosh also takes on the key role of Hecuba, Queen of Troy and is able to voice a welcome and crucially diverse perspective. Meanwhile, Topham also makes a brittle and showstoppingly complex appearance as Helen of Troy. The Greek wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, hers is the “face that launched a thousand ships” and caused the war when she fled to Troy. As both subject and beneficiary of the beauty economy and the male gaze, she is mocked relentlessly for her smallness and selfishness… yet given a platform for cogently and defiantly asserting her agency. It’s a revelatory moment that demonstrates how complexity and contradiction can coexist in female experience.
The play’s structure mirrors its thematic complexity, with the first half’s urgent mission to end the Trojan War providing a compelling through-line that crackles with purpose as it weaves in and out of key moments in The Iliad. The second half, which documents the group’s difficult return to Greece, is more episodic and less focused. It offers trenchant commentary in its counterpoints to Odysseus’ later journey, but begins to feel like a checklist of parallel encounters: Cyclops – check. Sirens – check. Scylla and Charybdis – check.
Breathtaking staging
Director Jackie Maxwell realizes the vast sweep and drama of the play with a muscular simplicity. Her direction, supported by Judith Bowden’s versatile set design and Thomas Ryder Payne’s evocative soundscape, transforms the Tom Patterson stage into a fluid playground for mythological reconstruction. The production’s most breathtaking moments come during its many maritime sequences, where simple ropes and benches become the group’s violently storm-tossed vessels through masterful choreography by Esie Mensah and lighting design by Michael Walton.
An especially haunting scene at Hades’ gates uses billowing fabric ribbons to enact the boundary of life and death, exemplifying the production’s ability to create indelible imagery from minimal elements and maximum imagination. As a result, the production that manages to be both intellectually rigorous and wildly entertaining, a rare combination that speaks to the sophisticated craftsmanship of everyone involved.
Playing the long game
What ultimately elevates Ransacking Troy most is its recognition of the achingly long game of social change. As the play progresses, this ancient Justice League becomes aware that their immediate actions may not succeed. This becomes not a source of despair, but of fierce determination. There is intrinsic value in navigating trials to grow into something greater. And they fight for future generations, who may find inspiration in their resistance. These are poignant and necessary messages in our current political environment, which seems riddled with newly lost causes and retrenchments.
In this light, the play’s title is both a metaphor for Shields’ dramatic methodology and a call to action. Shields, Maxwell and this uber-talented cast ransack not just the story of Troy but the foundations of how we receive and interpret classical narratives. It’s a joint act of controlled demolition: skewering and dismantling the fundamentally crude patriarchal assumptions — about theatre, about gender, about society — that fuel it, while nurturing alternative, expansive and invigorating human truths that are seeded in the heart of these ancient tales. This is a playbook that the King south of the 49th parallel, who is so hell-bent on blindly and deafly restoring past “classics”, could learn a lot from.
Running through September 28 at the Tom Patterson Theatre, Ransacking Troy’s freshly looted spoils demand – and richly reward – careful attention. Tickets are available at stratfordfestival.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
