Appearing in a double bill with Euripides is a bit like having your photo taken with Naomi Campbell - or Jude Law if you're a bloke. It's a decision which is liable to make you look a bit rough.
The question then is why has Tracy Hitchen agreed for her rude and frivolous modern comedy to appear alongside one of the most solemn and serious of all Greek tragedies? The answer is perhaps to demonstrate the banality of modern existence - and this it does amply.
Women Of Troy is the heavyweight drama in which Euripides rips apart the supposed heroism of the Trojan war and focuses on its appalling aftermath. All the men have been butchered after falling for the Greeks' wooden horse and the women are being rounded up as sex-slaves. Only Helen is excepted as her estranged husband Menelaus turns up intending to have her slaughtered for infidelities with Paris.
The heaviest thing about Tracy Hitchen's witty but enormously lewd domestic comedy is the two protagonists. The tone is that of a pilot for a post-watershed TV sitcom about a couple of northern flatmates, Ellie and Pat, who get caught up in a surreal, reality-TV dating farce. Ellie is a slightly slimmer version of Jo Brand, whose "gusset custard" is brought to the boil by virtual boyfriend Moonshadow. Childhood friend Pat is a sardonic, undersexed slob whose arteries "are so hard they carry flick knives".
Jo Combes's direction of Women Of Troy is formalised and sincere, with intense, grief-stricken performances from Kristin Milward and Anna Hewson as Hecuba and Cassandra. Joyce Branagh's direction of This Cookie is pure fluff, as spartan dramatic conventions give way to high-cholesterol kitsch and crudity. However, there are rounded comic performances from Zo' Cotty and Anthony Austin as the fat flatmates looking for love - even it they do seem emotionally lightweight next to the wailing women of Troy.
Women On Women by Women
