Hecuba review: A touching war story encouraging us to look closer

Queen Hecuba is exiled in this ancient tragedy, but Marina Carr's intimate reimagining gives all its characters multiple perspectives. Photo: Ste Murray  

Project Arts Centre, Dublin Theatre Festival

★ ★ ★ ★

On paper, Rough Magic’s play Hecuba - a reimagining of Euripides’s ancient tragedy - isn’t anything new. It is another script by Marina Carr wading through Greek myth, after By the Bog of Cats transposed Medea to the midlands, and On Rafferty’s Hill used the incestuous marriage of Zeus and Hera as an omen. Both those plays were revived in recent years, in large-scale productions with otherworldly sets and booming scenes of violence. 

More epic in premise, Hecuba begins among the wreckage of Troy after the Trojan War. Queen Hecuba is in her throne room, surrounded by her sons’ corpses and decapitated husband. It could be a scene filled with gore but director Lynne Parker’s production is surprisingly unstained, its spilled blood represented only by an elegant grape red cloth. It’s as if poetic embellishment, not graphic violence, is what’s important.

There’s a fascinating control in Carr’s approach to this tragedy. The characters switch between first person and third person narration, witnessing events from their point of view, but also studying the expressions of others. When the enemy king Agamemnon invades, Aislín McGuikin’s majestic Hecuba, numbed with grief, still observes all the ruthless details of his advance into the throne room. But Agamemnon is not completely heartless in Brian O’Doherty’s superbly complex performance, as he finds admiration for the overthrown queen.

Incredibly focused and full of suspense, Carr’s writing pushes Parker towards her best work in a decade. If the production sits its audience around Sarah Bacon’s spare set - an unflashy rubble of assembly hall furniture - that’s because it knows the importance of the play’s intimacy. Even Carl Kennedy’s affecting music is minimalist, while John Galvin’s video projection of fire and ash flickers only in the background. Plot details come vivid and restrained, as if asking us to lean in: a war story encouraging us to look closer. 

We peer inside different struggles with trauma, as Hecuba and her daughters are exiled to the coast of Thrace, singing poignant harmonies as they go. “We’re going to be alright, I say, though we are far from it,” she assures them, if not herself. Martha Breen’s Cassandra, damaged and embittered, believes her mother should plead Agamemnon for mercy. Polyxena, childish and innocent in Zara Devlin’s performance, is pulled from her sheltered life, chosen as a blood sacrifice to satisfy Troy’s enemies. 

“Everything has influence,” says Owen Roe’s Odysseus, justifying the need for the murder. But in this scene, Odysseus also sounds like Carr, who has long treated Greek myth as a source of modern violence. Destiny still mightn’t be disrupted in Hecuba but it does feel more complicated, as Agamemnon, reminded of his own young daughter’s death, agonises over killing Polyxena.

Euripides’s play ends with Hecuba’s rage burning into a horrendous act of revenge. It’s interesting that Carr rejects that detail - instead Cassandra tells us those crimes are mistakenly attributed to her mother. That leaves the play ending on a touching sombre note, walking away from the smoke. It has laid bare everything the war took. 

Runs until Oct 6th.