Euripides’ Helen, Trunk Theatre. Photo by Jerry Aulenbach

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Sometimes you just have to marvel at the adventurous chutzpah of Edmonton indie theatre. You just don’t expect to find yourself in a park on a sunny Sunday afternoon sitting in a lawn chair watching a Greek play happen in front of an planetarium.

That it’s an anti-war comedy by Euripides, as adapted by the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness (Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me),  is another surprise from Trunk Theatre. The premise of Euripides’ Helen is pretty wild: “There is no Helen of Troy,” says Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. “Paris got a ghost.”

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The Trojan War started, as you may recall from school, when Paris abducted Helen, who was married to Menelaus, and spirited her off to Troy. And the Greeks felt obliged to get her back. It turns out, as per Euripides’ comedy, that Paris only got the phantom version of the world-famous knockout. The real Helen spent the war hanging out in Egypt (a bunch of barbarians and slaves, she feels) and having no fun whatsoever, getting depressed and waiting for her husband to come and rescue her. If he isn’t dead, of course.

“I’ve never set foot in Troy,” she declares feelingly. Which means that a war with a high cost in human life on both sides was fought for an illusion, a cautionary tale. And the virtuous Helen has been blamed, and vilified as a slut. “I am cursed…. I caused the Trojan War,” she says. “I gave birth both to tears and blood.”

The crisis that starts the play is that the pressure is on: the King of Egypt is hot to marry the chaste Helen and he won’t wait forever while she stalls. And lo and behold, when a shipwrecked beggar  arrives on Egyptian shores, seeking assistance, he turns out to be none other than Menelaus himself. The obstacle to a happy ending is how they will escape and get home.

Amy DeFelice directs an all-female cast, led by Linda Grass as Helen, in dazzling white. McGuinness’s adaptation infiltrates the incantatory cadences of Greek with playful modern colloquial turns of phrase. And Grass negotiates these gracefully. “The Greeks believe I did the dirty on him.” Kristin Johnston plays Menelaus with amusing macho swagger. “When a big man hits the skids … one hellhole after another hellhole,” he says of taking the long way home in his post-war career. He doesn’t get a warm reception from Egypt: “no dogs, no Greeks, fuck off foreigner.”

Rebecca Merkley is funny as the brisk but gullible Egyptian king, who struts through his world confidently, punctuating his certainties by knocking on his chest armour.

The arrival of Helen’s brothers Castor and Pollux is a surprise, orchestrated by designers Rory Turner and Even Gilchrist. And the whole production has an agile, improvised feel to it, with an ensemble that veers, with comic touches, between the ritualized and snappy asides in DeFelice’s 90-minute production .

The new and huge Coronation Leisure Centre  in construction next to the planetarium is,  director DeFelice has noted wryly, is a stand-in for the ruins of Troy. The gods, as the odd character in this play observes, screw up from time to time, but they do provide.

REVIEW

Euripides’ Helen

Theatre: Trunk Theatre

Written by: Euripides and adapted by Frank McGuinness

Directed by: Amy DeFelice

Starring: Linda Grass, Kristin Johnston, Julie Golosky, Sophie-May Healey, Rebecca Merkley, Prudence Olenik, Caley Suliak, Jacquelin Walters, Alison Wells

Where: Coronation Park, in front of the Queen Elizabeth Planetarium

Running: through June 4

Tickets: eventbrite.com