The Women of Troy

· Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
96
Pages
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More

About this ebook

There's no decent way to say an indecent thing

An industrial port of a war-torn city. Women survivors wait to be shipped abroad. Officials come and go. A grandmother, once queen, watches as her remaining family are taken from her one by one. The city burns around them. First performed in 415BC, the play focuses on the human cost of war and the impact of loss.

This new Student Edition of The Women of Troy includes a commentary and notes by Emma Cole, which looks at the Trojan War as represented in Greek literature and myth; the context in which Euripides was writing and within which the play was first performed; how it would have been originally staged and dramaturgical challenges met; as well as recent performance history of the play, including Katie Mitchell's iconic 2007 production at the National Theatre.

Euripides' great anti-war play is published here in Don Taylor's classic translation.

About the author

Euripides was born near Athens between 485 and 480 BC. His first play was presented in 455 BC and he wrote some hundred altogether of which nineteen survive – a greater number than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined – and which include Alkestis, Medea, Bacchae, Hippolytos, Ion and Iphigenia at Aulis. He died in 406 BC.

Don Taylor (1936-2003) was a playwright and poet, and a director of theatre, television and radio plays. He worked as drama director at the BBC, and between 1960 and 1990, he directed nearly a hundred television plays. He translated and directed for BBC Television the Theban plays of Sophocles – Oedipus the King, Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus. He followed this with translations of three Euripides war plays – Iphigenia at Aulis, The Women of Troy and Helen. He was co-director of Compass Theatre for while and set up First Writes Radio with Ellen Dryden. Don Taylor's many stage plays include The Roses of Eyam, The Exorcism, Daughters of Venice, Brotherhood, When the Actors Come, Retreat from Moscow, When the Barbarians Came and his last play The Road to the Sea.

Emma Cole is Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is a classicist and a theatre and performance studies scholar. Her area of expertise lies in the performance of Greek tragedy in contemporary theatre and she has published extensively on this topic, as well as having worked in collaboration with various theatre companies and practitioners on related creative outputs.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.