The article I want to share in today’s post really touched a nerve when I read it last week. It was published in the Financial Times, written by Charlotte Eagar, and is about her project to stage the antiwar Greek tragedy, The Trojan Women with a cast of Syrian women who have fled their homeland’s vicious civil war for neighbouring Jordan.

If you don’t know the play, The Trojan Women is about refugees, set at the fall of Troy. All the men are dead and the former Queen Hecuba of Troy, her daughter Cassandra and the rest of the women are waiting in a refugee camp to hear their fate. Euripides wrote the play in 415BC as an anti-war protest against the Athenians’ brutal capture of the neutral island of Melos; they slaughtered all the men and sold the women and children into slavery. You can download the text of the play as an e-book here, or read it online here.

Eagar’s piece is definitely worth reading. It charts the whole project from beginning to end. It is both immensely inspirational and gut-wrechingly sad. Click the link below for the full article.

Syrian refugees stage Euripides’ ‘The Trojan Women’

You get a real sense of the power of the performance in the interview, below, with one of the actor refugees, known simply as Fatima.

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