Abstract
When asked if he had ever staged a production without music, Barrie Kosky’s response was a definitive no. His production of The Women of Troy, produced by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2008, is an exemplar of his particular approach to the use of music in theatrical productions. Into Tom Wright’s terse adaptation of Euripides’s The Trojan Woman, Kosky inserted a wide variety of vocal music, ranging wildly in style and compositional period. The selections include John Dowland songs, arias from the operatic repertoire, folk songs, American popular song, and more. This music, rather than playing a subsidiary role, equalled the text in importance, leading Halliwell (The Women of Troy: Barrie Kosky’s ‘operatic’ version of Euripides. Didaskalia 8, 2011) to wonder whether Kosky had rendered the Euripides text an opera. Building on Halliwell’s work, this chapter argues that The Women of Troy is operatic rather than opera. In doing so, it articulates Kosky’s sophisticated engagement with operatic tropes and conventions, and how he reconfigures them for a dramatic context.
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Notes
- 1.
The interview was recorded at the Sydney Theatre Company on 3 August 2011. All other citations refer to this interview.
- 2.
At the time of writing, one of these is still available on YouTube. The soprano Nicole Chevalier gives a 30-minute recital, accompanied by Kosky. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-aMbZmNdSg [accessed 11 February 2021].
- 3.
Personal communication, 29 July 2020. All subsequent quotations from Daryl Wallis are from this source.
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Davis, M. (2021). When All Else Fails, Sing: Barrie Kosky’s The Women of Troy. In: Phillips, J., Severn, J.R. (eds) Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres. Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_6
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