Ransacking Troy
By Mary Alderson
It’s evident that Maev Beaty and Irene Poole appreciate the concept behind Ransacking Troy. The two women, both brilliant, long-time actors at the Stratford Festival, are obviously enthused about their roles in Erin Shields’ play, premiering this year.
Shields has a talent for re-writing the classics, giving them a refreshing, feminist twist. She is best known for her play If We Were Birds, which won the Governor General’s Award for drama. Like Ransacking Troy, it updates classic literature from a woman’s perspective.
Ransacking Troy was commissioned by the Festival where it has been workshopped over the past few years, following the Covid interruption. Workshopping means that professional actors read and sometimes act out the new play, while the playwright refines their work. Both Beaty and Poole have been involved in the creation of Shields’ Ransacking Troy. Shields has taken Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and given the female perspective of the ancient Greek epic tales. “Ever since we workshopped it, I’ve been chomping at the bit to present it,” Poole says. Both say that they appreciate the opportunity to actually work with a living playwright, as compared to the many Shakespearean plays they have done.
This play brings together Shields’ work with director Jackie Maxwell again. Maxwell directed Shields’ re-telling of Paradise Lost, which proved popular during Stratford’s 2018 season.
Of course, in the original, men have been at war for 10 years, while the women are at home. In Ransacking Troy, the women decide to go to Troy and end the war themselves. “This play will poke and prod and provide another perspective from the other half of the population,” Beaty explains. Beaty plays Penelope, while Poole plays Clytemnestra. “There’s no place they’re afraid to go,” adds Poole. The two actors say this re-telling of the story is heart-rending, naughty and funny. The women are the rightful heroes. They confront violence: Rape is a weapon of war.
With an all-female cast of 9, who play at least two or three parts each with some playing up to six, the story covers many lives. Beaty and Poole as Penelope and Clytemnestra also play their characters’ husbands, Odysseus and Agamemnon. The cast also includes two understudies. As well as playing characters, the women use movement to create things such as a sea storm or a boat.
The two women are enjoying working together, which they haven’t done for more than 20 years, when they were in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Helena and Hermia. They even quoted Shakespeare’s line describing the characters: “So we grew together, like to a double cherry: seeming parted, but yet an union in partition, two lovely berries molded on one stem”.
Since that production, the two actors have grown to be good friends and now so are their daughters. They describe a visit to the beach in Grand Bend last summer where their young daughters wrapped their beach towels around themselves and used driftwood as walking staffs. “They looked very much like heroines from ancient Greece, perhaps Penelope and Clytemnestra,” says Beaty with a smile. Ransacking Troy is very much about female friendship, which is “a very popular theme,” Beaty adds.
Ransacking Troy is about female equality and women’s rights, they explain – something that is very important to them as mothers of daughters. “The women in Ransacking Troy are fully realized characters,” Beaty says, “who bring humour and humanity, as opposed to being characters who were once just on a periphery.”
Ransacking Troy is in previews starting August 6, with the opening night August 21. It continues in repertory at the Tom Patterson Theatre until September 28.
Photo: Maev Beaty as Penelope, Odysseus (left) and Irene Poole as Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Agamemnon, Ransacking Troy. Stratford Festival 2025. Photo: Ted Belton.