In Ransacking Troy, Ancient Greece’s “Forever War” Inspires a Feminist Fantasy
Martin Morrow*
Ransacking Troy, by Erin Shields; directed by Jackie Maxwell. August 6 to September 28, 2025. At the Stratford Festival, Ontario, Canada.
Enough is enough. The war has gone on for almost 10 years. The body count, of both soldiers and civilians, keeps piling up. The two sides have fought to a stalemate. It’s time for the women to step in and do something about it. Such is the premise of Erin Shields’s audacious new play, an alternative narrative of the siege of Troy in which the wives, sisters and daughters of its Greek generals and heroes, sick of waiting out the bloodshed at home, set sail on a mission to end this “forever war.”
Ransacking Troy, commissioned and produced by Canada’s Stratford Festival, is a pointed re-framing of the events of the Trojan War that can’t help but make an audience think of the widespread rage and frustration over the invasions of Gaza and Ukraine. It’s an angry work, but also one that is clever, moving and, often, very funny.
Canadian playwright Shields is all about re-examining the Western literary classics through a female lens. In her 2022 play Queen Goneril, produced by Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, she imagined a prequel to Shakespeare’s King Lear that sought to explain the motives behind Lear’s cold-hearted daughters. With Ransacking Troy, which received its world premiere in the 2025 Stratford season, she weaves a new, “untold” story into the Iliad about a women-led peace mission, while also viewing the macho deeds in Homer’s epic poem from a jaundiced feminine perspective.
The mission is instigated by Odysseus’s wife Penelope (played by Maev Beaty), who is getting antsy with all those opportunistic suitors breathing down her neck in Ithaca. She ropes in a reluctant Clytemnestra (Irene Poole), whose beautiful half-sister, Helen, was the cause of the war. Electra (Helen Belay), Clytemnestra’s daughter, insists on coming along, and she’s joined by Helen’s child, a teenage Hermione (Marissa Orjalo). The delegation also includes a wise queen, Eurydice (Yanna McIntosh), and a randy queen, Aegiale (Sara Topham), plus Ajax’s tough half-sister Galax (Sarah Dodd), brought along for muscle, and shipbuilder’s daughter Cur (Caitlyn MacInnis), for her carpentry skills. Unable to enlist a major goddess to aid them on their voyage, the women have to settle for silly Psamathe (Ijeoma Emesowum), the nereid who presides over sandy beaches.
Once arrived at Troy, they’re able to cunningly slip inside the city’s supposedly impenetrable walls and win the confidence of the Trojans through their queen, Hecuba (McIntosh again—the Stratford production’s nine-member cast all took on multiple roles). To convince the Greeks to back their peace scheme, they impersonate the Olympian trio of Athena, Hera and Aphrodite—after realizing the men won’t listen to their women, but they will listen to their goddesses. That scene, which also required the dexterous actors to portray their gruff male counterparts, became the show’s hilarious highlight.
Shields brightens her story with humour early on, but the shadow of Greek tragedy is never far away. It has a through line in the character of Clytemnestra, who is still grieving the death of her older daughter, Iphigenia, and hating her husband, the Greek leader Agamemnon, for sacrificing the girl to the goddess Artemis in exchange for fair winds to Troy. If, in Queen Goneril, Shields gave us a plausible reason why Regan would want to viciously pluck out the Earl of Gloucester’s eyes—he had raped her as an adolescent—here, she traces the conflicting emotions of Clytemnestra as she learns of her husband’s subsequent conduct in the war and builds up a strong case for why she would ultimately want to murder him on his homecoming.
We are also reminded throughout of the subservient roles played by women in a patriarchal society and the way men dominate them through sheer physical strength and fear. As with many a so-called “strongman” today, the only hope of appeasing them is by appealing to their pride. Even after they believe they’ve ended the war, the Greek women remain uncertain of how to go forward with their success and build a new, equal society—leading to a litany of questions recited in one of the play’s occasional Greek-chorus scenes.
While the first part of the play is backgrounded by the events of the Iliad, the second half becomes a female Odyssey, with our heroines on their homeward voyage confronting many of the perils—from the Sirens and the Cyclops to Circe—to be later encountered by Odysseus. Not surprisingly, the women deal with most of them differently: they playfully identify with the treacherously alluring Sirens, while Penelope bonds with the witch Circe (Emesowum) over their shared passion for the art of weaving.
The production was directed by Jackie Maxwell, one of Canada’s most distinguished directors and a champion of female playwrights, who previously staged Shields’s hit adaptation of Milton’s Paradise Lost for Stratford in 2018. Maxwell drew lively and distinctive performances from her all-women ensemble, led by the superb Beaty and Poole in the two primary roles.
Beaty, an actor who excels at playing witty, headstrong characters, gave us a Penelope every bit as shrewd and resourceful as her famous husband. She was an intrepid contrast to Poole’s gloomy, bitter Clytemnestra, who, having lost one daughter, is understandably anxious about Belay’s wilful Electra.
Playing the two most senior characters, McIntosh exuded weary wisdom as Nestor’s wife Eurydice and embodied a powerful Hecuba that could’ve stepped out of Euripides’s The Trojan Women (another of Shields’s classical sources). Among the younger actors, Emesowum was especially fun both as the bubbly beach goddess Psamathe—a sort of nereid Barbie—and as a lonely Circe in need of girlfriends. In a sweet touch, there was also a budding shipboard romance, between MacInnis’s butch Cur and Orjalo’s femme Hermione, that took us out of Homer’s demesne and into that of another Greek poet, Sappho.
The show was mounted in Stratford’s Tom Patterson Theatre, whose elongated thrust stage is perfectly suited to a play set largely aboard a ship. Judith Bowden’s spare set, darkly lit by Michael Walton, was dominated by an upstage structure, a large frame strung with ropes, that alternately suggested a gate, a ship’s rigging and a warp-weighted weaver’s loom, not to mention that Homeric symbol, the lyre. Bowden also designed the delightful costumes, which revealed how many changes you can ring on the classical Greek robe.
Shields ends her play on a downbeat with the imminent return of the status quo—true to the Homeric tale, but disheartening all the same. In Clytemnestra’s unresolved anger we get a foreshadowing of the further tragedies awaiting the House of Atreus. And although we know Penelope’s is a happier ending, she’s going to have to wait another 10 years for it. When she told the women that she’s going home to Ithaca, “Odysseus might already be there,” you wanted to call out, “I wouldn’t be in any rush!”
In our time, women have achieved much of what these heroines hope for, and yet there are still men in power making war, killing thousands in the name of revenge or to satisfy their own egos. In her enticing feminist fantasy, Shields hasn’t so much ransacked the Troy of Homer as confirmed its enduring relevance.
*Martin Morrow is a Past President of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association and a two-time winner of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Award for excellence in critical writing. He has served as chief theatre critic of the Calgary Herald (1988-2000), Fast Forward Weekly (2003-06) and The Grid (2011-14). Since 2010, he has been a theatre critic and arts writer for The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper.
Copyright © 2025 Martin Morrow
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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