A fantastic online show of Euripides’s take on Helen of Troy

Everyone knows Helen of Troy. The feckless sex popsicle betrayed her husband, Menelaus, and ran off with the dashing Paris, which triggered the ten-year Trojan war. The Greeks were victorious but after sacking the city they went straight home again. So what was the point?

Euripides’s play Helen takes a radically different approach in this Zoom production by the Centre for Hellenic Studies at Harvard. The script is crammed with enough twists and turns to make an entire Net-flix series but the running time is barely 60 minutes. Euripides opens with a narrative bombshell by revealing that Helen was absent from Troy throughout the conflict. The gods had spirited her to Egypt where she enjoyed the protection of a local warlord who declined to seduce her. This courteous gent has died and Helen is now being targeted by the powerful and lusty Theoclymenus. She claims sanctuary at a temple and refuses to marry him while Menelaus is still alive.

Thus Euripides overturns the traditional portrait of Helen as a sex-mad, bed-hopping airhead. Here she’s a pious, chaste and intelligent operator. Menelaus arrives in Egypt and the pair are reunited. But there’s a problem. During the war, Menelaus recaptured ‘Helen’ from Troy and hid her in a cave. What’s going on? Euripides explains that this ‘Helen’ was a figment created by the gods ‘from a cloud’. In other words the entire war was caused by a mirage.

The lovers know that they’re in mortal danger. Theoclymenus hates all Greeks and will kill Menelaus if he gets the chance. So Helen hatches a plot. She tricks Theoclymenus by telling him that Menelaus’s corpse has been discovered on the shore. She offers to accept his proposal as soon as her late husband has been buried at sea.