This new Student Edition offers a much-needed pedagogical framework to the play, including an overview of the original performance context; the times within which Euripides was writing it; and how it's been understood and adapted since.

There's no decent way to say an indecent thing

An industrial port of a war-torn city. Women survivors wait to be shipped abroad. Officials come and go. A grandmother, once queen, watches as her remaining family are taken from her one by one. The city burns around them. First performed in 415BC, the play focuses on the human cost of war and the impact of loss.

This new Student Edition of The Women of Troy includes a commentary and notes by Emma Cole, which looks at the Trojan War as represented in Greek literature and myth; the context in which Euripides was writing and within which the play was first performed; how it would have been originally staged and dramaturgical challenges met; as well as recent performance history of the play, including Katie Mitchell's iconic 2007 production at the National Theatre.

Euripides' great anti-war play is published here in Don Taylor's classic translation.

"The play itself is an astonishing document. Written shortly after the Athenians had butchered the men and enslaved the women of the Sparta-aligned island of Melos, it was filled with a subversive topicality. Euripides focuses on the sufferings of the Trojan Hecuba, Cassandra and Andromache in the aftermath of their city's fall. But the play was clearly intended as a conscience-provoking metaphor about the arrogance of power and the hideous aftermath of war, and it doesn't take much imagination to see it as directly applicable to our own times." - Guardian

"Flexible casting options, short length and rousing monologues make this a brilliant text for students … Emma Coles Women of Troy provides a really comprehensive, and useful historical context, and a particularly helpful performance context and overview of production history." - Drama & Theatre Magazine