Women in Troy as told by our mothers

The play’s author, Portuguese director and playwright Tiago Rodrigues, drew inspiration from various versions of the myth, as well as recent world events and stories from his own life and those of cast members Alesya Andrushevska, Manja Topper, Kuno Bakker and Tomer Pawlicki.

The historical record is re-examined with a feminist gaze. When mothers get to do the talking, what story will they tell? What’s their take on this never-ending, pointless war? What roles are assigned to them, and what roles would they rather take? We share in the ambitions and visions, fears and yearnings, frustration and rage of Helen, Hecuba, Cassandra, and Andromache.

Tiago Rodrigues rewrites classics, adapts novels and combines true stories with fiction. For Women in Troy, As Told by Our Mothers he drew on various versions of the Troy myth, as well as recent world events and personal experiences from his own life and those of theatre makers and cast members Alesya Andrushevska, Manja Topper, Kuno Bakker, Tomer Pawlicki.

ABOUT TIAGO RODRIGUES

The first ambition of Portuguese actor Tiago Rodrigues is to play with people who'd want to come together and invent shows. His encounter with the belgium company tg STAN in 1997, when he was but 20, definitively confirmed his attachment to the absence of hierarchy in a creative group. He would develop his acting, his dramatic writing, and his taste for the collective. The freedom of performance and decision given him then would forever influence his future shows. Tiago Rodrigues thus found himself repeatedly and early in his career in a position of instigator, and little by little came to direct and write projects he “stumbled upon.” In parallel to that, he also wrote screenplays, articles, poems, prefaces, op-eds, etc. In 2003, he co-founded with Magda Bizarro the company Mundo Perfeito, with which he created many shows without settling down in any specific location, becoming the guest of many national and international institutions. In France, he notably performed his Portuguese version of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra at the Festival d'Avignon in 2015. By heart is presented in 2014 at the Théâtre de la Bastille, which later invites him to lead an "occupation" of the theater during two months in spring 2016, during which he created Bovary. Director of the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II in Lisbon from 2015 to 2021, Tiago Rodrigues nevertheless continues to create shows using the limited means he has appropriated as his own artistic syntax. On a larger scale, he has become a builder of bridges between cities and countries, at once host and advocate of a living theatre. After being appointed as the future director of the Festival d'Avignon in July 2021, while presenting Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in the Cour d'Honneur du Palais des papes, he takes up his post in September 2022.

ABOUT DOOD PAARD

Theater Company Dood Paard functions as a collective. The artistic team consists of actors Manja Topper, Kuno Bakker and Tomer Pawlicki and technical producer Michael Yallop. Dood Paard creates performances based on various sources of inspiration: classical texts, modern classics, new texts, current themes. The work is idiosyncratic and open, raw and philosophical, humorous and painful, controversial and acclaimed, frenzied and subdued.