The stories of the events surrounding the Trojan wars are chronicled in The Iliad, the epic attributed to the Greek poet Homer. Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, sails to Sparta to take Princess Helen as his prize after a promise by the Goddess Aphrodite that he should have the most beautiful woman in the world. After the abduction, Helen’s husband Menaleus, calls upon an oath made by all Helen’s former suitors that they would defend her honour if ever she were in danger. A force of a thousand ships was massed in Aulis under the control of Agamemnon and the Greeks set sail for Troy.

Among the Greek army was the legendary Achilles, son of the mortal Peleus and Thetis, a sea-mymph. Thetis, who could forsee the future, saw that her first son from this marriage would die in battle. In desperation she dipped Achilles in the River Styx to make him immortal, but his ankles were left exposed.

When Troy refused to return Helen the Greeks lay siege, an ordeal which lasted ten long years. In the tenth year, Achilles and Agamemnon quarelled, causing Achilles to withdraw his forces, giving the advantage to the Trojans. When all seemed lost for the Greeks, Achilles finally returned to fight when his friend Patroclus was slayed by Hector, Troy’s greatest warrior. After gaining revenge for Patroclus by killing Hector, Achilles is then killed, just as the prophesy fortold.

A stalemate ensued until the Greek soldier Odysseus built a huge wooden horse, big enough to fit many elite troops inside. The Greek fleet sailed away leaving one man, Sinon, who told Troy that his army had given up and left the horse as a gift. In jubilation the Trojans dragged the horse into the city and celebrated. Priam’s daughter, Princess Cassandra, prophesied the city’s downfall but was ignored. That evening, when Troy slept, the Greeks crept out of the horse and slaughtered all the men and took the women as prizes of war.

In our production we go behind the myth to explore the underlying reasons for the war. The story of the horse is replaced by a more realistic deception by Sinon and we highlight the histories of the real Heroes of Troy.
“In war the first casualty is innocence.”

This has been a play of two halves. We began rehearsals straight after Christmas but didn’t touch the script. We looked at different ways of telling stories, different approaches to choral work and which parts of the story we thought were important. Much of what you see on stage started off as ideas in these sessions. Then we had a break of two weeks in which we very quickly rehearsed a cabaret show, performed with the Wirral Schools’ Big Band at the begining of March. As you can imagine this was a fairly manic two weeks!

Finally we got down to working with the script, incorporating all the ideas from the previous four weeks work. Performing Greek theatre requires incredible amounts of effort from all the cast as the chorus have to work together and work hard at all times, depsite the fact that they may not be saying anything or even moving very much. If the lead characters in a play are good then the play as a whole will be fine. But when the smaller roles are played by committed and talented actors who are working as hard as the leads, then, and only then, can a play can be truly excellent. The cast and crew (and their parents!) have all given up a lot of time and spent a lot of energy on this production. We hope that you enjoy it!