The Trojan Women, War and Men

The war is over and counting the dead is a testimony of the last moments of dehumanisation. On the one side, there are a fighter, a warrior and a compassionate messenger. On the other, an old woman, a mad woman, an obedient wife, a seductive woman. In the end, gods and their game. While the city burns, the Trojan women, turned towards the sea, are waiting to learn their fate: some will become slaves of Greek heroes, the fate of others will be up to a draw.

As Monique Wittig says, women are a gender, because men are, unfortunately, the general. Despite that, today’s patriarchal society considers men to be the first victims. We know that the actual victims are women and people who express their feminine traits (women, men, or transsexual persons), and yet the first ones to suffer because of the limitations in society are men. People forced to follow this model of omnipotence turn themselves into fakes, archetypes, mock leaders. But opening up to their feminine half, intrinsic to all humans, develops the ability to accept and understand otherness that may be born from self, yet always remains the Other. The Trojan Women, War and Men will formulate a hypothesis. It will question the possible direction women might take if they had a chance. And what men could gain if they had eyes to see and accept otherness in themselves.

When we decided to stage The Trojan Women we did not know that while studying for the production the world would become something else. We were preparing a feminist discourse on stereotypical narratives about women in tragedies, and then, not far from us, a war broke out. The staging thus became an act of double courage: speaking about war now, and with actresses whose political bodies are escaping the norms and canons of Western society.

The Trojan Women, War and Men will be a tragicomic, almost clumsy attempt to reflect on patriarchal power and oppression.

The Trojan women exist in a place that isn’t there – the atopos. Women are like objects in the ruins left behind by the war men fought.

This group of people – the Atopos – will, with their otherness, their bodies and their ridiculous fragility give a voice to exiled foreign women, women excluded from society, witches, prostitutes.

Marcela Serli