What’s the best way to tell a war story? The final two new plays in the Stratford Festival’s 2025 season muse in very different ways on this question — as did Forgiveness earlier in the summer.
Erin Shields’ brilliant Ransacking Troy reimagines one of Western culture’s foundational narratives — the Trojan War — from the perspective of the women implicated in it. And in The Art of War, Yvette Nolan thoughtfully imagines the life of a Canadian soldier-artist in the Second World War, who’s wracked both by what he witnesses and the responsibility of recording it.
Shields’ scope is as broad as Nolan’s is focused. Both scripts enjoy stellar stagings that reflect a deep connection between directors, creative teams, performers, and material. Both have their wobbles. And viewed back-to-back they offer bracing perspectives relevant to our own (war)time.
Like all of Shields’ works, Ransacking Troy is a lady play. By this, I don’t mean that the stories are only about women and can only be enjoyed by women (anyone can be a feminist). Rather, Shields’ plays centre women’s experiences, retell familiar narratives from female perspectives, and offer great roles for female-dominated casts.
In Ransacking Troy, the ladies in question are the women of Greece who waited nine-and-a-half years for their men to vanquish the Trojans before taking matters into their own hands. That happened in the past, and the play tells us, fellow women of Greece, how it all went down, with the narrative moving back and forth between direct address and enacted scenes. The first act takes us to the end of the Iliad, while the second follows the women back to Greece along a course similar to that of the Odyssey.
Figuring the audience as female opens up a space of complicity, and at many points I felt like I was in one of those conversations with your girlfriends where you talk about things as they really are, and laughter and tears flow freely. Another of Shields’ skilful premises is making Clytemnestra (Irene Poole) a central figure: A minor player in the Iliad, here her inconsolable grief over her daughter Iphigenia’s death becomes a key theme drawn through the play, as Clytemnestra channels grief into rage and action and works toward a new way of holding that loss.
Maev Beaty’s impulsive, driven Penelope serves as an excellent foil to Poole’s regal Clytemnestra: It’s Penelope’s exasperation that compels the woman to sail to Troy, even if this is, as Penelope admits, a “completely mad” idea.
Each of the other seven performers plays a central character who is similarly individuated, among them Sara Topham’s sex-positive Aegiale (the Samantha Jones of ancient Greece); Ijeoma Emesowum’s adorable Psamathe, a minor goddess whose particular jurisdiction is sandy beaches; and Caitlyn MacInnes’s tough and tender Cur, a shipwright whose storyline brings questions of class and sexuality into the mix.
Judith Bowman’s superb costumes further enhance characterization, with contemporary accessories differentiating the youthful characters (played by Marissa Orjalo, Helen Belay, and MacInnis) from older ones played by Yanna McIntosh and Sarah Dodd, in signature palettes of flowing yellow and crimson respectively.
All of the actors take on further roles, at times playing characters in conversation with themselves, as with an exhilarating scene late in Act One when the women of Greece finally come face to face with their husbands in Troy.
Here and elsewhere, I found myself marveling at this company’s capacity to pull off ambitious feats of performance and stagecraft that probably looked impossible or hokey on paper. Jackie Maxwell’s commanding production creates a propulsive energy that sweeps along as Shields’ script moves cinematically between locations, from ship deck to Helen of Troy’s chambers to tents where women protect each other from sexually predatory soldiers.
Bowden’s set features a monumental wooden frame laced with rope, representing both the ship and a giant loom on Circe’s island; the actors also move benches to suggest new locations. Michael Walton’s lights, Deanna H. Choi’s music, and Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design work in dynamic harmony to create new locations and atmospheres. On opening night, an early Act Two storm scene, in which Esie Mensah’s sweeping choreography comes to the fore, earned a spontaneous round of applause.
It’s in part thanks to the expansive scale of this storytelling that Ransacking Troy overall felt to me both too long and too short. The first act strikes a perfect balance between third-person narration and embodied action; the zooming in and out is highly effective.The second, though, moves through episodes familiar from the Odyssey as if on a careening tour bus: No sooner has a character shouted “It’s a Cyclops!” that we’re speeding on to a stargazing scene and then a harrowing episode at the mouth of Hades.
Shields is working some powerful and timely themes in Act Two, asking how, on the back of the women’s seeming success in ending the war, they can enact and maintain systemic change to their misogynistic, classist society. But I found myself wishing the play was an epic two-parter that gave the second half as much air and space as the first, rather than a single evening that, despite its many joys, flags in its back half.
A sustained scene on Circe’s island is evidence of the results Shields and the company achieve when they have the time to spin out an idea. The women ask each other a huge list of questions about their new society (“How do we move forward?” “What kind of world are we trying to create?” “Is violence a biological imperative?”) in an intoxicatingly intense conversation that’s also, Shields implies, a form of self-indulgence such as that which compelled Homer’s Circe to turn men into pigs.
Shields’ writing is clever on multiple levels and often very funny, with badinage informed by screwball comedy and contemporary deadpan. (“I have been cursed with ambrosial beauty,” purrs Topham’s Helen of Troy. “You see what I’ve had to live with?” cracks Clytemnestra to Penelope.)
Despite these structural concerns, it’s thrilling to witness an entirely female-identifying cast acting their Grecian sandals off on the Tom Patterson stage in a lavishly resourced production — a feminist triumph for Stratford, Shields, and Maxwell, and doubtless not the last outing for Ransacking Troy. The text is a godsend for university and college drama departments looking for large-scale, ideas-driven, female-centric plays.
The contemplation of profound ideas is also a seam of The Art of War, which premiered in Saskatoon in 2023 under playwright Nolan’s direction. All of the characters who interact with the artist protagonist Nick (Josue Laboucane) help him process his experience of war. This includes the cabaret entertainer Eva (Julie Lumsden), who shares with Nick a curiosity about what makes art beautiful. She recalls an opera about an abandoned woman whose “heart comes out of her in shattered little pieces” when she sings.
For me this line is the key to the play’s dramaturgy: It’s an assemblage of scenes that are shards of Nick’s experience, shattered little pieces of his war-scarred psyche. When we first meet Nick’s buddy Newman (Jordin Hall), the two embrace and catch up about what’s been happening since basic training, and Nick sketches Newman holding a rifle. But Newman comes back a few scenes later and doesn’t seem to remember that first encounter: is this a new Newman? While Nolan doesn’t spell things out explicitly, I understand that the repetition compulsion of trauma informs the character and the structure of the play as a whole, which takes place in Nick’s memory.
Keith Barker’s flowing, compact production meets Nolan’s text beautifully. Teresa Przybylski’s design resembles shattered little pieces of a set: A series of grass-covered platforms wheeled out in scene breaks at various angles, offering different sections of the Studio Theatre audience the opportunity to look at Laboucane’s face in some scenes and his canvases in others, under Logan Raju Cracknell’s sensitive lighting.
The four supporting players do exceptional character work. Hall’s loving, solid Newman never wavers even as Nick’s perception of him shifts. Lumsden is charming and in exceptional voice as Eva, whose snippets of song become one of the show’s recurrent layers (and she looks stunning in an empire-waisted dress designed by Patricia Reilly); and she exudes considerable empathy as the educator Heather. With dignity and grit, Jenna-Lee Hyde plays Magda, a refugee in the unidentified part of Europe where most of the action takes place. Rylan Wilke is similarly riveting as Matthaeus, a German painter on the run whose relationship to his work helps Nick understand his own.
There’s less for Wilkie to do with the character of Dennis, a brash American photographer whose dialogues with Nick are a bit too on-the-nose in debating the status of photography as an interpretative or documentary form. Such a tendency to tell rather than show is the script’s periodic weakness, and there’s something underrealized in the use of abstracted projections that appear when Nick is painting (there’s no credited projection designer).
Laboucane, a skilled and ever-watchable actor taking on his first central role in a Stratford production, may still be landing in his characterization of Nick. On opening night his performance felt centred in his head and upper vocal register, and still finding its way to his gut. This is understandable: the character is onstage through virtually all of the 90-minute-long production, processing a huge weight of feeling and experience. In a fleeting final scene, we got a glimpse of the embodied gravitas that Laboucane may find in the character throughout.
To return to my opening question: Both of these plays are successful in telling war stories because they find ways to refract perspectives. They uncover wisdom about violence, trauma, and healing by, in the case of Ransacking Troy, telling a canonical story in a fresh way; and in The Art of War’s, by reflecting a traumatized person’s experience of the world. There’s a brief topical episode in Ransacking Troy where Shields figures the Lotus Eaters as doomscrollers, walking like zombies staring into light coming out of their palms. I’m left thinking of these two productions as interventions against doomscrolling — somewhere else to look than the news while contemplating toxic masculinity, the imperative and challenge of systemic change, and the healing power of art-making.
Ransacking Troy and The Art of War run at the Stratford Festival until the weekend of September 28. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Karen Fricker
Karen Fricker is editorial advisor for Intermission magazine, adjunct professor of Dramatic Arts at Brock University, and a member of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. She has worked as a critic in Toronto; London, UK; Dublin, Ireland; and New York City, and has a PhD in theatre studies from Trinity College, Dublin. Her book The Original Stage Productions of Robert Lepage: Making Theatre Global (Manchester University Press) was the winner of the 2022 Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s Ann Saddlemyer Award for the best book in English on a Canadian topic. Her research interests also include contemporary circus and the changing nature of theatre criticism in the digital age.
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