“Unlike other Greek tragedies, The Trojan Women, strangely enough, lack the story line. The keystone dramatic event, the downfall of Troy, had taken place right before the play starts. The scenes show little more than just survival of Trojan women who had got together prior to the collapse of their citadel, waiting for boarding galleys to be sent in slavery.
While they are contemplating on their pitiful future, their only actions are weeping and lament about their arduous destiny. This is exactly the reason why some critics claim that The Trojan Women is a play with no dramatic component.
As a theatre author, I believe that there is nothing more dramatic than to be forced to wait for and foretell your own miserable, unpredictable and unavoidable fate.
I am sure that many of us, Japanese, who had to live through loosing the World War II, had lived in that sort of emotional state. Contemplations about such analogies had brought me to choosing this text. I wanted to make certain that if I made my characters of Japanese war survivors living in ruins, I should be able to reanimate the passions implanted in The Trojan Women through their multi-layer existence on the stage. I hope that this approach would let me show how universal human sufferings pass through the borders of time and space, be it Japan or Western countries.” Tadashi Suzuki
Media about the performance
The Trojan Women by Tadashi Suzuki is a perfect production of the theatre of ritual using Euripides’s text as a springboard creating direct link between the Japanese and Greek systems of symbols.
The Guardian
The great Suzuki’s achievement is mixing and beating up the elements - movements, gestures, intonations - of the traditional Japanese theatre together with modern and purely western elements. He does this utmost coherently and thrilling the audience.
Financial Times
For this production, Suzuki intersected the Greek tragedy with classic forms of Kabuki and Noh, having transformed Euripides into a contemporary Japanese author. The Trojan Women by Suzuki is a true splash of sufferings on the matter of devastation of human soul.
The New York Times