Euripides' Greek tragedy The Women of Troy is one of the most devastating plays he knows, Dr Harry Love says.
He has recently completed a new translation of the play and is directing a production at Allen Hall which opens on July 10. It is his 20th production in conjunction with the classics department at the University of Otago, many of which have been filmed and distributed internationally as school and university study aids.
''The play is devastating - an apocalyptic play insofar as apocalyptic means to lift the veil, and when you lift the veil there is nothing there except your awareness of nothing,'' Dr Love says.
''It's almost 20th-century in a lot of its implications. Everything that makes life bearable is simply stripped away and all you have is a howling agony on stage.''
The play is set at the conclusion of the Trojan War when the Greeks are sacking and burning the city and the Trojan queen Hecuba and some of the women are waiting to be divided as spoils, and taken into slavery.
It is not about war itself, but about the aftermath and what happens to people, the collateral damage. It is relevant in the context of the centenary of World War 1, which falls next year - 100 years since the Europeans shot each other up, Dr Love says.
Troy was across the Dardanelles from Gallipoli, in what is now Turkey. Dr Love has set this production in the late 19th-century Balkans as the Greeks probably did resemble Balkan bandits and there is a sense the women are Middle Eastern, he says. Hecuba, played by Marilyn Parker, who has acted in several of Dr Love's productions, is determined to hang on to whatever she can, but gradually it is all stripped away.
There is also a sort of courtroom scene between Hecuba and Helen over who is to blame for all this, Dr Love says.
The Trojan war started because Paris, son of Priam King of Troy, eloped with Helen, wife of Menelaus and said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Menelaus, the king of Sparta, gathered his compatriots, raised 1000 ships and sailed to Troy to besiege it for 10 years.
Dr Love has the two actors playing Helen and Menelaus also playing the gods Athena and Poseidon, who appear at the beginning of the play, because in a sense they behave like gods who lack pity.
''That's the essential difference right through the whole Greek thing - gods are pitiless. They have emotions and feelings, they get angry, usually very indignant about things, but they have no sense of how someone else might feel about it, they are emotionally stunted creatures. In Greek tragedy, most people suffer at some point because they have offended a god.''
The divine notion of justice is if someone has done something wrong you restore the balance no matter what the collateral damage. The human notion of justice entails something like fairness - if you are going to restore the balance, find the people who are really guilty and do not tromp on anyone in between, Dr Love says.
Emotions mean different things in different cultural periods and the Greek sense of what emotions were is different in some ways from our post-Romantic sense of individualism.
''There are some things in common and one is the notion of pity, but it isn't just the pity that we know. In a sense it's a very broad-meaning word which encompasses all sorts of affection and positive feeling outside of sex. It encompasses 'philoi' which you might translate as loved ones, but in this case the word includes not just your family, though it will include them, obviously, but also your friends and fellow citizens. Everybody with whom you have a connection that somehow defines who you are, so when you take those things away, you are taking away a person's identity.
''If there's such a thing as a significant life, certainly in the Greek context, it's how you fit into your social, domestic and civic context. Take those away and you are, in a sense, dead, but it's worse than being dead because you are, as is pointed out a couple of times in the play, because you are aware of it. It's a much less psychological notion than our post-Romantic view,'' he says.
See it
The Women of Troy, by Euripides, translated and directed by Dr Harry Love and with music by Corwin Newell, is at Allen Hall Theatre from July 10-13 at 7.30pm. There is a 2pm matinee on Saturday, July 13.
