Suppliant Women, The

Fifty women leave everything behind to board a boat in North Africa and flee across the Mediterranean. They are escaping forced marriage in their homeland, hoping for protection and assistance, seeking asylum in Greece.

Written 2,500 years ago by the great playwright Aeschylus, The Suppliant Women is one of the world’s oldest plays here in a new version by The Lyceum’s Artistic Director David Greig. At its heart are fifty young women in full chorus arguing for their lives, speaking to us through the ages with startling resonance for our times.

Re-uniting the creative team behind the acclaimed production The Events – The Guardian’s best play of 2013 – The Suppliant Women uses the techniques of Ancient Greek theatre – recruiting and training the citizens of Edinburgh to create an extraordinary theatrical event.

Part play, part ritual, part theatrical archaeology, it offers an electric connection to the deepest and most mysterious ideas of the humanity – who are we, where do we belong and if all goes wrong – who will take us in?

The critical consensus

The Suppliant Women is a brilliantly theatrical and emotionally resonant experience.

(*) Michael Cox, Across the Arts, 09/10/2016

This is an exhilarating show, rich with resonance and power. Rush to Edinburgh, the Athens of the North, to see it while you can.

Simon Thompson, WhatsOnStage, 05/10/2016

For composer John Browne's massed chorales to be delivered with such choreographed fire as they are is a captivating show of strength.

(*) Neil Cooper, Coffee-Table Notes, 05/10/2016

Here is a play that comes from when drama was invented and that contains one of the first recorded mentions of the word ‘democracy’. 2 500 years later, the questions raised – about patriarchy, democracy, warfare, refugees and the fear of anything that seems ‘other’ – are frighteningly current, and seemingly no nearer any resolution.

(*) Hugh Simpson, All Edinburgh Theatre, 05/10/2016

The Suppliant Women is an intelligent attempt to reimagine Greek tragedy.

(*) Gareth K Vile, The List, 05/10/2016

Theatregoers hunting for serious frowns and solid Greek masks must carry on searching. This is a fresh, contemporary production of an ancient drama that proves the city of Argos is not so very distant from the city of Edinburgh.

(*) (*) S.E. Webster, The Reviews Hub, 05/10/2016

Aeschylus’s tale of escape from forced marriage and the perils of exile is made brilliantly tense in David Greig’s thoroughly democratic production.

Mark Fisher, The Guardian, 06/10/2016

Empowering and unmissable!

(*) Irene Brown, Edinburgh Guide, 05/10/2016

Outstanding performances, emblazoned with a critical mass of supreme assurance. Miss at your peril.

John Kennedy, The Edinburgh Reporter, 07/10/2016

Gray’s production, presented on a raised and extended platform that adds unprecedented depth to the Lyceum stage, resounds with memorable, often pithily funny lines (“How does it work, this thing called democracy?”) and imagery that lingers in the mind.

(*) Allan Radcliffe, 06/10/2016

The show as a whole sets out David Greig’s stall as Lyceum director with a tremendous, thrilling clarity.

(*) Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, 08/10/2016

The Suppliant Women is undoubtedly an impressive, distinctive introduction to Greig’s tenure; an admittedly somewhat startling promise of things to come.

(*) Paul F Cockburn, Broadway Baby, 10/10/2016

David Greig’s opening production finds modern resonance in millennia old classic.

(*) Robert Peacock, TVBomb, 05/10/2016