Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy review – Michelle Dockery's Helen shows how women saying 'no' is a political act in Ava Pickett play

Greek mythology obsession is sky-high right now, and so it seems only right that a woman ground it in reality.

In her sophomore offering, playwright Ava Pickett clips the wings of thousands of years of epic poetry by showing us the unfiltered aftermath of Helen of Troy's return to Sparta.

It's true that Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey gave us a far grittier representation of Greek soldierhood than we've seen before, using the mud and blood of World War One-style filmmaking to show us that the romance of war has always been a comfortable lie we tell ourselves.

And yet, the burden falls to the feminine perspective to bring the truths of these far flung battles home to roost.

Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy is set on the night Helen (Michelle Dockery) returns after 10 years of battle, reuniting with her childhood best friend Cee (Laura Aikman). Over the course of the night, the pair discuss old wounds, fractured loyalties and which of them made the wrong choice in staying or going.

The best thing Pickett does with this concept is remove it from the abstract world of sword and togas and dump it unceremoniously in the walls of modern-day Essex. Colchester born herself, she seamlessly blends the sensibilities of the Ancient Greeks with the familiar curves and sharp contours of English politics.

Fights become riots, the battlegrounds of Troy become Preston and Kent, and the audacity of Paris and Helen's relationship becomes all the more loaded when Paris is dubbed "foreign." Nothing could have pulled the so-called glory of the Trojan War down to earth more for a British audience than swapping swords for petrol bombs and conquests for sexual assault.

However, that doesn't stop the piece from feeling elevated and just as intellectual as any staging of Oedipus. Amongst the talk of GCSE grades and prosecco, all the beats of a Greek tragedy are there.

Ethan Moorhouse plays the role of Messenger, and perfectly encapsulates the ethos of a Greek chorus. His monologues fold the audience into the story and are a masterclass of language, as they bring lyrical verses about gods and earth into contact with sticky pubs and hard marriages – I cannot overemphasise how easy it is for the mixing of classical and modern language to be cringeworthy and this wasn't at all.

But of course, the real triumph of the show is the women. Pickett's writing and the cast work in harmony as every woman brings their own set of lights, shades, greys and just about every colour of the rainbow. It feels so painfully real to watch Laura Aikman's Cee go from the bubbly to belligerent to broken, or for Dockery's Helen to show her toughness intermingled with desperately sad trauma.

Every female character feels like someone you know and the biggest power is how each one of the makes you turn inward and think. If I found a character annoying I wondered what influence was lurking behind that feeling, if I sympathised with one of them I wondered if that reflected what I would do in this situation.

The realness of it was this show's biggest strength but the thing is, I found myself too often thinking about the play than actually enjoying it. While the dialogue was perfect, the play still struggled to really grip me and immerse me in the goings-on.

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The best pieces of art tend to have you so rapt you're unable to think until afterwards, but Bloodsport left too many gaps in the action to have me fully locked in, and some scenes felt unfinished. The most effective moment by far was with Emma Monnickendam's Hermione, yet this ended too swiftly for my liking and could have led to deeper discussions of motherhood and those who don't truly suit it.

The same can be said for the ending, which left me feeling utterly bereft – although I expect that was Pickett's intention. After all, Helen of Troy is a story that's lasted for millennia, perhaps she's saying it's time to cut it off and move on. All that fuss over just one woman choosing to leave.

Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy will run at London's Stratford East theatre until 10 October 2026.

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