Thanks to the smash hit success of “1536”, her “coruscating” play about three young women in Tudor England, the English writer Ava Pickett is flavour of the month, said Sarah Crompton on WhatsOnStage. Now, she has produced a new play – “Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy” – which is so powerful she might well prove to “be flavour of the year and of many years to come”. The drama, in which Helen (played with “high-wire intensity” by Michelle Dockery) is brought back to modern-day Essex after a civil war in England is “full of spit, fire and brilliance”. It’s like “Sarah Kane crossed with ‘The Only Way is Essex’ – devastatingly funny but utterly furious about the state of the world and the way that women within it are treated”.
Years ago, Helen left her husband Marcus (Menelaus) for a “foreigner”, prompting hordes of angry men to wreak havoc for a decade in her name, said Emma John in The Guardian. In a Towie-style home, her former close friend Cee, who is married to Marcus’s brother Mario (Agamemnon), hosts a tense event to mark her return – blood-spattered and still in shock. Given the recent scenes of masked men protesting in Dover and Portsmouth, Pickett’s dystopia feels “uncomfortably close, albeit infused with a Martin McDonagh-esque black wit”.
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