After Troy

By Glyn Maxwell

Troy is in ruins. Its men are dead. Its women are captives and the victorious Greeks are camped in the ashes preparing to sail home. Four quarrelling women drawn together by grief… Four exhausted soldiers who hate each other’s guts… A King who falls for a girl so mad she can see the audience… A teenage princess dreaming of the Underworld… And a lonely man of conscience trying to get it all down on paper…

Award-winning poet and playwright Glyn Maxwell rips up two Greek tragedies and makes a modern play from the fragments. A witty and passionate retelling of Euripides’ Women of Troy and Hecuba, After Troy exposes the cruelties of war both then and now.

'Glyn Maxwell’s drama does not so much conflate the two great tragedies of loss and revenge [Women of Troy and Hecuba] but rather alights, magpie-like, on what is shiny in each to create a brand new play – Lyn Gardner, Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Release date: Jun 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781849433181

Glyn Maxwell

Glyn Maxwell has long been regarded as one of Britain’s major poets. He has been awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Prize, and the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as being shortlisted three times for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Three of his books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems was published last year. Many of his plays have been staged in London and New York. They include The Lifeblood, which was British Theatre Guide’s ‘Best Play on the Fringe’ at Edinburgh in 2004, Broken Journey and The Only Girl in the World (both Time Out Critics’ Choices). Oberon Books publishes his Plays One (The Lifeblood, The Only Girl in the World and Wolfpit), Plays Two (Broken Journey, Best Man Speech and The Last Valentine), The Forever Waltz, Liberty, After Troy, Merlin and the Woods of Time and the libretti The Lion’s Face and Seven Angels.