Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 106

The cast from Queens of Syria
The Sunday Times (����) review of the performance at the Young Vic in
London puts it best:
“Theatre itself is their Trojan horse for making us appreciate them as
people, not statistics.” The presence of these courageous, compelling
women on stage, telling their stories about death and domesticity,
jolted audiences out of the complacency that made “killing people ...
normal.” (Maxwell)
As the actors in the original The Trojan Women reminded the Athenian elite
of their own brutal behavior on Melos, so the Queens of Syria evoked for
their audiences the human cost of inaction. In both cases, empathy does not
mean simply feeling the feelings of someone else, but rather absorbing and
translating those feelings into one’s own psyche and context. Herodotus
recognized the power of this process of personalizing empathy. He writes that
the play The Sack of Miletus, by Phyrnichus, was banned and the playwright
fined because the work so upset the audience with reminders of the real and
then-recent sack of Miletus by the Persians (�.��) (Meineck ����).
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