Erin Shields’ new play Ransacking Troy refuses to travel the path of least resistance.
Now playing at the Stratford Festival, this feminist reimagining of Homer’s epics, directed by Jackie Maxwell, casts a searing look at sacrifices made in the name of male glory. More daring still is the play’s confrontation with the question of how to create systemic change.
Led by Clytemnestra (Irene Poole) and Penelope (Maev Beaty), an assembly of Greek women recounts how they brought the Trojan War to an end. But their triumph heralds uncertainty about the future. With the men returning, will the women of Greece maintain their wartime independence? A cast of nine women/non-binary actors performs every role in this drama, including the men.
After seeing Ransacking Troy, I had the opportunity to speak over Zoom with the two leads. “This is an ensemble of some of the most extraordinary femme actors in the country and beyond,” Beaty told me. “Every once in a while, there’s these jewels on the thread of a career where you get to smash the Bechdel test all to pieces.”
One of Shields’ long-time collaborators, Beaty noted that the #MeToo movement was the playwright’s inspiration for Ransacking Troy, observing that the play’s content has only become more relevant over the years. “The world has caught up [unfortunately] to the other themes, the global themes, certainly the themes about female power and disempowerment,” she said, “but also themes of conflict in war, the cost of war, questions of the aggressor and the victim, questions of responsibility in warfare.”
She pointed out these questions were of course always present in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but that Shields has shaped her source material to respond to our current moment. Ransacking Troy is distinctly intersectional in scope, tackling issues of class and violence in addition to its focus on gender. With her characteristic blend of humour, heart, and scorching rage, Shields tells it like it is.
“I’ve done a few plays that have taken a risk to tell some devastating truths in my career, and I find that it is often the younger audience members who find it incredibly invigorating and galvanizing to see the truth being told: ‘actually, it’s this bad,’” said Beaty. “And instead of that being depressi[ng], it’s enraging and invigorating and there’s a burst of energy to do something about it at the end. And that’s, I think, what theatre can do that nothing else can do in terms of it being experienced live together in the room.”
In one of the play’s most climactic scenes, Penelope motivates the women to act by reminding them of the power of their rage. Poole spoke to me about how women are told to hide their anger, from childhood through motherhood, noting the gendered dynamics of rage. “I do think that as women it’s important to not be told that we can’t have those emotions. It’s so limiting for us, in terms of the full expression of the human experience,” she said. “Erin also obviously understands rage, the importance of rage as a tool, as a tool for change, as a tool for communication.” In Ransacking Troy, the cast is empowered to “live in the rage for a moment and see what happens.”
Rage and grief are significant elements of Poole’s performance as Clytemnestra. You may be familiar with the story of Iphigenia’s sacrifice at Aulis. Agamemnon, en route to Troy, slits his daughter’s throat to summon wind for his warship. At the top of the play, Clytemnestra is as emotionally raw as the day her daughter was murdered 10 years prior.
Per the casting schema, in which each actor plays their primary character’s male counterpart, Poole performs as both Clytemnestra and Agamemnon (Beaty is both Penelope and Odysseus). In an emotional scene confronting Iphigenia’s death, Poole is the rageful, grieving wife who cannot understand her husband’s actions; she is also the husband who has done the unthinkable and now lives with his shame.
It’s an exciting challenge. To do the scene justice, Poole must embody each character’s perspective. “I found myself having to break down both characters, and go: ‘OK, what does Clytemnestra want in this scene and what does Agamemnon want in this scene?’ And try to play both sides with a deep sense of personal truth.”
Clytemnestra’s path to healing, however, depends not on Agamemnon but the somewhat ragtag, and frequently hilarious, women around her who, Poole noted, are each on their own journeys of self-discovery. Poole described how Clytemnestra finds “beauty through female friendship, power through accomplishment, and a sense… that they are fighting for something very real.” Penelope, especially, helps to lead her out of the darkness.
“I am so fully myself with Maev all the time, on and offstage,” Poole shared. She and Beaty have a long history: for instance, they played Hermia (Poole) and Helena (Beaty) together in the 2006 Resurgence Theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The two recalled a moment when Beaty carried Poole in her arms; she does the same in the second half of Ransacking Troy. “She’s back in my arms again!” Beaty laughed during our call.
And they see themselves in their daughters. “We were on the shores of Lake Huron together last summer and we have this extraordinary photo of the two girls,” Beaty told me, noting how the image anticipated the spirit of their characters in Ransacking Troy. “It’s Clytemnestra and Penelope,” she said. “There they are, heroically, bravely going off to try something with some found objects on the water line. It felt like an omen, and now here we are.”
The photo feels especially pertinent given the intergenerational themes of the play, which asks how choices made today will resonate in the future. Clytemnestra’s daughter Electra, played by Helen Belay, frequently challenges her mother’s worldview. Throughout the play, this younger generation crafts their own idea of what an alternative world could look like.
Of course, Ransacking Troy is also in constant dialogue with the past. Shields builds on a tradition of classical Greek poetry, conversing with her source material through allusion and subversion — and the dimensionality of this work extends behind the scenes. Ransacking Troy has drawn together a cast and crew with their own epic histories in Canadian theatre: “There are decades of extraordinary experience in that room,” observed Poole. This includes Maxwell, former artistic director at the Shaw Festival, whom Beaty and Poole credit with creating opportunities for women in the arts. “Jackie is responsible for the amount of space that women take up in the theatre world in this country,” Beaty reminded me.
The opportunity to work with women contemporaries can be rare, Poole noted. “You travel parallel paths for so long, since often plays don’t have women of the same age in multitudes like this one does.” For instance, she shared that she has known Sarah Dodd (Galax and others) for years but that this is their first time working together. And she described how meaningful it is to work again with Yanna McIntosh (Eurydice and others), whom she last performed with in The Little Years at Stratford in 2011. Her reflection captured the layered magic of Ransacking Troy, and the collaborative effort that has brought it to the stage.
“When I meet Eurydice for the first time when we get to Aulis, I look at Yanna and I go… ‘I know you.’ There’s history, and that’s the beauty of working at a place like Stratford,” said Poole. “There is a history and a depth of knowing people that makes the work so much more rich and nuanced.”
Ransacking Troy runs until September 28 at the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre. More information is available here.
The Stratford Festival is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Ferron Delcy
Ferron Delcy is pursuing her PhD in early modern literature at the University of Toronto. In 2024, Ferron participated in the New Young Reviewers program facilitated by Toronto Fringe and Intermission. She is a big fan of ghost stories, fog machines, and weird metaphors.
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