Ajax

Ajax is a tragedy of aftermaths, beginning the morning after a furious and devastating bloodletting. Enraged by a slight to his honour, Ajax attempts to murder the Greek military commanders camped outside Troy. But maddened by Athena he instead turns his sword upon their sheep and cattle, and then, in humiliated shame, upon himself.

The First World War setting of Jack Shepherd’s naturalistic production makes it all seem frighteningly possible. In a dingy field hospital, shell-shocked and dying soldiers, and the women wearily tending them, provide the appalled, grieving and feverishly delusional voice of the tragic chorus. Instinctive regimental loyalties replace self-preservation and logic in the minds of traumatised Tommies. And their underscore of tuneless whistling and mirthless laughter suffuses the drama with the mutedly gut-wrenching music of men past hope.

A slow start and a subdued first movement are ratcheted up into something like a political thriller centering upon Toby Wharton’s Teucer, a public schoolboy in khaki, desperately clinging to untenable moral absolutes amid ethical and emotional carnage. He receives first rate support from the character actors in the company, with John Giles as a repulsively pompous Menelaus, and Dan Mullane as Agamemnon, scarred, scared, vindictive and possessed of a laugh like a death rattle.

Matthew Sim’s Odysseus wanders and watches, lighting his roll-ups with tell-tale shaking hands, exhausted beyond vengeance or triumphalism. As his divine confidante Athena, Jody Watson offers damage-limitation rather than salvation, appearing ex machina in a blood-stained nurse’s uniform. And Iarla McGowan makes a convincingly shattered hero of the suicidal Ajax: his detailed and understated performance reveals the charismatic and loved leader, the careful professional soldier, as well as the embittered victim of fate.

Ajax is playing in repertory with Macbeth and A Skull in Connemara, and the company have the attentiveness, authority and gravitas of a proper acting ensemble. In their grimy, bloodied hands, Sophocles’ drama acquires an unpretentious, slightly battered and totally compelling integrity.