Review by Erin Blackwell for San Francisco Frontiers

How To Avoid War

"The Trojan poet is dead. The Greek poet will tell the story." The final line of There Will Be No Trojan War (1935)--a.k.a. Tiger at the Gates--suggests why we never got Troy's version of the death of its culture. Because the Greeks won the war, they got to spin the story, and to this day we repeat their myths. Five years before his country declared war on Nazi Germany, French playwright Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) imagined the Trojan hero Hector as a man who tries and fails to pass the peace pipe to the war-mongering Greeks. This elegant modern tragedy carefully deconstructs the Helen of Troy pretext, as Hector (staunch Malcolm Brownson) deploys a series of diplomatic tactics to avert war. The impediments he encounters are generated by his fellow citizens, who appear to think (then as now) with their dicks. Irony of ironies, his chief antagonist is a poet (wiry Clive Worsley)--i.e., the media.

This exquisitely reasoned, deeply felt analysis of the (un)avoidability of war is a great spiritual gift. Students of human nature and French culture owe a debt to the Shotgun Players, who made a last-minute schedule change to present this timely classic. Although even the subtlest of actors would find the wily dialogue a challenge, artistic director Patrick Dooley's hardy cast delivers the challenge laid down by this rehabilitated Hector: to fall out of love with war.

Through Jan. 12, Eighth St. Studio Theatre, 2525 8th St., West Berkeley, (510) 704-8210,

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Original article on the web at
http://www.frontiersweb.com/sfv20iss18/Pages/in_on_the_act.html