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Trojan Barbie single work   drama   - 75 Min; p67
Issue Details: First known date: 2007... 2007 Trojan Barbie
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Lotte, a modern-day English tourist who repairs dolls, is on a Cultural Tour for Singles in Troy when she encounters Andromache, fleeing the rape of her city. An American soldier captures Andromache; Lotte tries to intervene, only to be captured herself. Meanwhile, two American soldiers kidnap a young virgin (Polly X, who is Hecuba's daughter) to drink beer and party with the tigers at the Baghdad Zoo. When the prison camp is torched, the women are enslaved but Lotte is rescued by the British Embassy. Lotte's life returns to normal-- until a revenge-obsessed Hecuba claws her way up through the centuries to Lotte's doll-shop, in search of her murdered children's bodies.' (Source: Australian Script Centre website).

Production Details

  • Commissioned by Roberto Gutierrez Varea, El Teatro Jornalero!, and the University of San Francisco's Performing Arts and Social Justice Program for a student workshop production as The Doll Hospital. World premiere scheduled for 2009 at the American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts.' (Source: Australian Script Centre website).

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

First known date: 2007
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Collection #7 : 27 New Plays from the Australian Script Centre Lian Tanner (editor), Hobart : Australian Script Centre , 2008 Z1594920 2008 anthology drama The twenty-seven plays on this CD have been selected by our National Reading Group as representing some of the best in contemporary Australian scriptwriting. Many of them have either won or been short-listed for major prizes, and they cover a wide range of themes and styles, from documentary theatre to seditious comedy and apocalyptic drama. Some of the playwrights are well-established, others are emerging writers whose work shows exciting potential. (Source: CD ROM) Hobart : Australian Script Centre , 2008 pg. 29

Works about this Work

Charles de Gaulle Airport : The Camp as Neoliberal Containment Site in Two Trojan Women Adaptations Phillip Zapkin , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Comparative Drama , Spring vol. 51 no. 1 2017; (p. 1-21)

'

Theatre, and particularly theatrical adaptation, offers a mode of resistance to neoliberal anti-democratic privatization by appealing to a common performative culture. Femi Osofisan’s 2004 play Women of Owu and Christine Evans’ 2010 Trojan Barbie both adapt Euripides’ Trojan Women to protest neoliberal quarantining of the dispossessed. These plays reflect the Euripides hypotext and simultaneously carry resonances of an Attic performance context rooted in the shared civic collective of the democratic Athenian polis. Osofisan sets his version after the 1821 conquest of Owu, in modern day Nigeria, but the play’s language is laced with satirical references to the Iraq Invasion. A Bush-and-Blair rhetoric of liberation and freedom contrasts the violence and enslavement of Owu survivors. Evans focuses more broadly on dispossession, foregrounding philosophical discussions of deprivation and liminal statelessness. In adapting Euripides’ anti-war tragedy, the contemporary dramatists locate our economic and martial moment alongside a classical condemnation of exploitation, deprivation, and enslavement, thereby raising questions about the “freedom” so often promised by neoliberals. Each play’s mise-en-scéne makes abundant the devastation of dispossession. The ruined village of Osofisan’s play and Evans’ refugee camp visually echo enclosures throughout nations under neoliberal hegemony. The women’s enslavement makes clear the stakes neoliberal governments and corporations see for quarantining the impoverished and the oppressed. Simultaneously, however, both playwrights locate possibilities for resistance to militaristic and imperialistic capitalism in performance itself, suggesting that performance offers a means to maintain one’s cultural identity in the face of dispossession, and to establish cosmopolitan empathy through hybridizing performance.' (Publication abstract)

Charles de Gaulle Airport : The Camp as Neoliberal Containment Site in Two Trojan Women Adaptations Phillip Zapkin , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Comparative Drama , Spring vol. 51 no. 1 2017; (p. 1-21)

'

Theatre, and particularly theatrical adaptation, offers a mode of resistance to neoliberal anti-democratic privatization by appealing to a common performative culture. Femi Osofisan’s 2004 play Women of Owu and Christine Evans’ 2010 Trojan Barbie both adapt Euripides’ Trojan Women to protest neoliberal quarantining of the dispossessed. These plays reflect the Euripides hypotext and simultaneously carry resonances of an Attic performance context rooted in the shared civic collective of the democratic Athenian polis. Osofisan sets his version after the 1821 conquest of Owu, in modern day Nigeria, but the play’s language is laced with satirical references to the Iraq Invasion. A Bush-and-Blair rhetoric of liberation and freedom contrasts the violence and enslavement of Owu survivors. Evans focuses more broadly on dispossession, foregrounding philosophical discussions of deprivation and liminal statelessness. In adapting Euripides’ anti-war tragedy, the contemporary dramatists locate our economic and martial moment alongside a classical condemnation of exploitation, deprivation, and enslavement, thereby raising questions about the “freedom” so often promised by neoliberals. Each play’s mise-en-scéne makes abundant the devastation of dispossession. The ruined village of Osofisan’s play and Evans’ refugee camp visually echo enclosures throughout nations under neoliberal hegemony. The women’s enslavement makes clear the stakes neoliberal governments and corporations see for quarantining the impoverished and the oppressed. Simultaneously, however, both playwrights locate possibilities for resistance to militaristic and imperialistic capitalism in performance itself, suggesting that performance offers a means to maintain one’s cultural identity in the face of dispossession, and to establish cosmopolitan empathy through hybridizing performance.' (Publication abstract)

Last amended 2 Jul 2018 11:57:55
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