A challenging shift of venue from the usual Playhouse Theatre to the smaller Te Whare Tapere Iti made Wednesday night’s performance an intimate and revealing affair. Intimate in that the audience was close enough to the actors to feel part of the play, revealing in that the proximity made it impossible for the audience not to feel the emotional intensity generated by the players.

Two of them in particular had memorable performances. [More] 

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Some of the surreal absurdity of the Trojan War lies not merely in the fact that mankind continues to engage in such barbaric conflicts some three thousand years later but that many of those conflicts still occur in roughly the same area. If the modern troubles of the Middle East seem too much of a geographical stretch for this claim, consider that several Gallipoli Invasion landing points were only a few kilometres from the ruins of ancient Troy. 

Trojan Barbie is at its best when it neatly draws the parallels between the atrocities of the mythic war and the modern ones. It’s at its lowest when it tries a little too hard to layer on too many coats of metaphor. 

The play shifts between a modern retelling of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, a historical echo of the myth and a pseudo time travel tale. For me the script undercuts itself by never quite settling on a style. This deconstruction is probably the playwright’s intention but it leaves me feeling a little unsure as a viewer.

The core plot element, a refugee camp of women from a conquered kingdom, is what truly resonates: Bronze Age barbarism given a veneer of modern civility that only serves to highlight the dark cracks, not disguise them. The women watch, wait and wail as each new indignity and inhumanity is weighed upon them, still as pertinent now as millennia ago.

The other modern addition is less smoothly joined: a Western woman on tour of Anatolia caught up in the hostility. This does serve thematic perspectives: comparing entitlement, exploring the nightmarish trap of being caught beyond communication, and both playing straight and then subverting the idea that we only care about such humanitarian crises when Westerners get involved. But Lotte Jones (Georgia Pollock), the tourist, feels separate from the other story rather than part of it and the doll metaphors (she works in a doll hospital) feel like one layer too many on an already overly layered piece.

Pollock does well with the detached, benevolently entitled Lotte, making her both likeable and identifiable. There’s some nice character work as her predicament becomes worse but the script undercuts potential character development past a point, which is a shame. 

The women of the camp are the most similar to their source material, a Greek chorus, with dialogue often paraphrasing ancient lines. As such they are more of an emotive force than a naturalistic one, and they certainly work well together getting the loss and despair across.

Lily Empson as Cassandra delights in her character’s madness, unabashedly energetic but with glimpses of sadness beneath the insanity. Sherrie Roue-Walker as Polly X gives the most relatable character in the play: a creative, naive and slightly spoilt teenage girl who dreams of being an artist and is bitter that her life and her city have been destroyed. She’s the most naturalistic of the female characters and Roue-Walker makes her at once obnoxious and sympathetic.

As the more naturalistic characters, many of the males are a little more recognizable than their female counterparts. Two soldiers escorting Polly to her fate are as believable as they are unlikable, though they only get a little character development. Andrew Lyall as Taithybius gives a strong performance that contrasts reasonable and eloquent language with utter heartlessness.  

Nick Hall is Mica, a camp guard, really makes the most of this character, the most multifaceted in the play. Mica is a weary soldier, an idealist worn down by years of war, desensitized to the horrors around him. While all the soldiers embody the banality of evil, Hall in many ways presents the most chilling side, that of a good man committing atrocities simply because that’s his job.

The rough set of scaffold and canvas evokes a refugee camp well and a sound-scape fills in the rest, the unseen sounds offstage letting us fill in the scale of horrors.

Trojan Barbie is a clever play with solid performances. Perhaps it’s just a personal preference for naturalism but I can’t help but feel it would have been more effective as a straighter retelling of The Trojan Women in a modern setting, rather than the somewhat stilted time-warping piece it is. But there are more than enough relatable parts to engage and challenge the audience with a harsh take on contemporary brutality.

To quote Mark Twain: “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.” 

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