It’s 3am, and Trojan princess and priestess Cassandra (Elizabeth Blackmore) is wide awake.
Breaking the fourth wall, as is her ‘gift’, she shakes with nighttime tremors as she takes us in, the Troy opening night audience at he Malthouse, clustered in the dark just beyond set and costume designer Dann Barber’s striking, sand-strewn amphitheatre. And then she strikes us all down with one inescapable fact:
The person gasping in fear at this Olympian gods-forsaken hour is who we really are.
She should know. Cassandra was barely a teenager when she was given up to worship at Apollo’s (Danny Ball) feet by her mother, Hecuba, Queen of Troy, portrayed by the magnificent Paula Arundel, sporting a truly fabulous wig and incalculable spirit.
Resisting the cruel and creepy, golden-masked god of truth and prophecy’s leery call to take off all her clothes, Cassandra instead demands power without humiliating supplication.
For this, Apollo damns her with an unobstructed view of all future history, from the invading Greeks’ monstrous, merciless sacking of Troy to its inescapable echoes in our darkest hour, and on to the smothering death of the universe.
Maddening enough, to know your brutal fate to the last minute, but Cassandra is doubly done over, also cursed in that her prophetic warnings are rendered illegible. A wise woman misunderstood, or actively ignored.
Troy: Tom Wright & Ian Michael
As written by Australian playwright Tom Wright and energetically directed by Noongar creative genius Ian Michael, Troy is a mirror of our doom. Of an age when land is valued more than lives and slaughter occurs daily with nary a care from our so-called leaders.
Of women and children subjugated, abused and distorting fake news. A contemporary era not at all unlike the wilds of ancient mythology, where the whims of twisted gods crush the hopes and dreams of the masses.
Blackmore soars as Cassandra, spanning this impossible gap in ways both metaphoric and anachronistically literal, dulling the pain by punching darts in a Blondie T-shirt, clutching a plastic IGA carrier bag.
Barber’s canny choice carries us with her, contrasting her woman-out-of-time with the rest of the cast’s shimmering costumes of diaphanous gowns and burnished plate metal that hew closer to the past.
Cassandra is not too nationalistic to sympathise with Greek warrior Achilles (also Ball) and his lover, Patroclus. The latter is portrayed hauntingly by siren-voiced Hamilton star Lyndon Watts in a refreshingly genderqueer performance that also sees him inhabit the abducted (or freely wooed) Helen, now of Troy.
More myth than truth, she’s an inciting incident wrought unavailable by dint of being too beautiful to exist, with Watts bringing the necessary presence behind this absence.
Even if you’re obsessively familiar with Homer’s epic Iliad (I sheepishly raise my hand), much of what you might expect to see has been elided or upended.
Who falls from the wall? Not who you think. An arrow is never strung, though swords are drawn.
Troy: refusing to do what’s expected
Much like Cassandra, Troy is exhilarating precisely because it refuses to do as we’ve been told. Michael’s towering workstands tall on a Greek and Trojan chorus of mighty performers.
Ball brings a heartsore inevitability to Achilles’ heel turn from invulnerable champion to broken man, when Hector (Mark Leonard Winer, also a menacing King Agammemnon) comes for his lover.
Geraldine Hakewell glimmers as Mycenaean Queen Clytemnestra, terrified by the increasing radicalisation of her golden-eyed daughter, Iphigenia (a mesmerising Ciline Ajobong), twisted in knots by her acidic father.
Arundel’s Hecuba dances between devotion and disdain. Each actor wears many faces.
Wright repeatedly steps us out of the story, as hilariously dudebro podcasters and archaeologists alike trample in the dust of what once was, recasting a tale told a trillion times over. Michael corals this mayhem with steady-handed aplomb.
When war comes, machine guns rat-a-tat-tat incongruously and bombs erupt as time itself fractures.
Brutal massacres follow, bodies burned to ashen smoke, almost unbearable to witness in a world where we can doomscroll atrocities on our phones.
Lighting designer Paul Jackson opts for shadow and deathly blues over infernal fire, hauntingly so, with Marco Cher’s sound design and Rosalind Hall’s score equally ghostly, holding us captive in the blast zone, with choreographed battle rendered bloody by Lyndall Grant.
Through it all, Cassandra anchors us, speaking her truth to a dictaphone that mangles her meaning. Chained by a black balloon around her neck, a symbol of protest against the maddening futility of war, it’s blown up, literally, to depict the tragedy of Troy’s most enduring image.
Lest we forget? Did we ever try to remember? As the doomsday clock ticks inexorably on, Wright’s majestic work, electrically staged by Michael, wonders if we’ll even make it past midnight and on to the encroaching light beyond 3am?
Troy is at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, until 21 September 2025. Find out more.
