Review: Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy

Quentin Tarantino has never adapted Homer. On the evidence of Ava Pickett’s second play, he wouldn’t need to change much. So writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk…

Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy borrows the claustrophobia from Reservoir Dogs, the righteous-vengeance mechanics from Inglourious Basterds, and the powder-keg atmosphere from The Hateful Eight, and then relocates the whole shebang to a Home Counties living room.

Lisa Spirling’s first production as Stratford East’s new artistic director inherits a script from a writer on a serious hot streak (Ava Pickett’s 1536 is currently being turned into a BBC/HBO drama series), and the family resemblance between the two plays is hard to miss. Both are set in Essex, a county built for straddling London sophistication and provincial attitudes. Both watch powerful, vindictive men wreck the women orbiting them. Both know exactly when to pull the floor out from under an audience and let them drop.

Where 1536 stayed in its own century, Bloodsport drags the Trojan War into the present day. Michelle Dockery’s Helen is the prodigal wife who left husband Marcus (Jay Taylor, playing the Menelaus role with general menace) for new lover Paris; her childhood friend Cee (Laura Aikman, essentially Clytemnestra without the name tag) takes her back in, hoping normal service can resume once Marcus and Cee’s own husband Mario (a bullish Gerard Monaco) return from the fighting.

Meanwhile, Helen wants anything but “normal.” Between scenes, a poetic Messenger-cum-barrowboy bridges the gap between Homeric text and Pickett’s contemporary update. While amusing enough on his own terms, every appearance costs the main plot a little momentum it never gets back.

“Quentin Tarantino has never adapted Homer. On the evidence of Ava Pickett’s second play, he wouldn’t need to change much.”

Domestic Thriller Meets Greek Tragedy at Stratford East

Spirling’s direction is the strongest thing on stage: pacing that snaps rather than strolls, dialogue seeded with real tension, and a genuine gift for turning one static living-room set from cosy to unbearable without moving a stick of furniture. Dockery — back on a London stage for the first time since Network at the National in 2018 — and Aikman (making her stage debut and disguising it well) generate real heat together; their comic timing does the early legwork the script itself hasn’t quite earned yet, and there’s a compelling instability in Dockery’s Helen, swinging between blood-stained, shell-shocked victim and something considerably more dangerous inside the same scene.

**Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy credit: Tristram Kenton**

Monaco and Taylor bring bullish energy to two men whose main traits are entitlement and thuggery, ostensibly fighting for Helen’s honour and, more plausibly, for their own appetites. Maimuna Memon’s deadpan housemaid is a joy throughout, and Ethan Moorhouse’s Messenger — cheeky, quick, over-relied-upon — walks off with scenes he probably shouldn’t be allowed to.

Polly Sullivan’s set does real thematic work: a cream-on-cream lounge, multiple doors and windows, built less for comfort than for paranoia about who’s about to come through which one. Cee’s party dress against the men’s combat gear is a clean visual joke that doesn’t need explaining, and Zeynep Kepekli’s lighting tracks the slide from domestic normality to chaos with some precision.

The trouble is that Pickett and Spirling aren’t always working from the same script, tonally speaking. The Messenger’s interludes want a knowing, almost stand-up register; the domestic scenes want us to believe in bloody deaths and mortal danger; the transitions between the two arrive like clumsy gear changes on a busy city junction.

Pickett had the option to cut Bloodsport loose from its mythological scaffolding and let it stand as its own contemporary thing. Instead, she keeps circling back to Homeric beats that mostly just remind you the mythology is there, without doing much new with it: a war whose stakes stay hazy throughout, comedy that’s funnier than the play’s tragic ambitions can comfortably survive. Sometimes coming over as a particularly violent episode of EastEnders, this ought to have landed with more force than it does. It lands instead in the crowded middle of London’s current Greek-myth revival (see also: the Bridge’s Oresteia, two star-studded West End takes on Oedipus announced within 30 minutes of each other, Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss in Electra at the National, and Odyssey on cinema screens), distinguished mainly by its regional accents and a filthier line in jokes.

“The trouble is that Pickett and Spirling aren’t always working from the same script, tonally speaking.”

That Pickett would go on to sort out precisely this kind of tonal whiplash in 1536 is cold comfort on the night. What’s on paper here is bold. What’s on stage is a script and a production not quite finished arguing with each other. Quentin Tarantino, meanwhile, has apparently decided the stage suits him better than Helen suits Essex: his own West End debut, The Popinjay Cavalier — a swashbuckling 1830s comedy starring Sacha Baron Cohen — arrives in spring 2027. If he’s looking for a cautionary tale about borrowing a classical framework and then not fully trusting it, he should buy a ticket to this play.

Featured Image: Michelle Dockery in Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy at Theatre Royal Stratford East, London. Photo by Tristram Kenton