Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy - Ava Pickett’s urgent riposte to toxic masculinity

With masked gangs of angry men currently on British streets, Ava Pickett’s riposte to toxic masculinity, which transposes the aftermath of the Trojan war to contemporary Essex, couldn’t feel more timely. This is an early play by the writer whose 1536 won a Standard Award and took the theatre world by storm last year. It’s less polished but still urgent and muscular.

Pickett’s flair for rich, heightened dialogue, and for puncturing high drama with sudden humour, are already thrillingly present. Like 1536, Bloodsport is built around three strong and complex female roles, embraced with relish in Lisa Spirling’s punchy production by Downton’s Michelle Dockery, Gavin and Stacy star Laura Aikman and the always-watchable Maimuna Memon.

It opens with the tattooed, menacing Messenger (Ethan Moorhouse) laying out the preamble in language that blends myth and mockney, rather like early Steven Berkoff. Helen (“a Toby Carvery sort of girl” with a “laugh like a fishhook”) and Cee were TOWIE-style best friends, married to brothers Marcus and Mario. Then Helen ran off with a suave foreigner, Paris, and the men’s reaction “forced a country to eat itself alive”.

We then cut to Cee (Aikman) in a Chanel-style minidress and red stilettos, fussing at her cleaner Dani (Memon) in a beige Clacton McMansion, after which Pickett springs the first of many surprises. Cee’s husband, the bullet-headed, jacked Mario (Gerard Monaco) and the diffident Marcus (Jay Taylor) return with Helen (Dockery), blood-smeared and barefoot in her underwear.

Her nervy jitters are at odds with the ensuing brittle nattering, an attempt to reassert normality. From here, the play accelerates in ways I won’t spoil. Suffice to say that battle lines are drawn, albeit shakily, along gender lines.

The updating of the Greek tale requires some imaginative juggling. Marcus and Mario wear the sort of mock-militia gear favoured by hard right thugs and it seems they are gangster populists with armed followers. They used Helen’s departure to stoke racial hatred: there have been riots, battles, a firebombing of a beautician’s salon. Women have borne the brunt of the violence, including Cee and Mario’s daughter Lydia.

Laura Aikman (Cee) and Gerard Monaco (Mario) in Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy.

Pamela Raith Photography.

Since this is portrayed as a civil war, taking place no further afield than Leeds or Preston, it’s not quite clear who the men of Paris’s faction are, nor why Mario and Marcus should have been away for ten whole years. This is nit-picking, though. The broader sweep of Pickett’s writing is bold and strong. “Men do terrible things for no reason all the f*cking time,” the forceful Dani says. Women, as in 1536, cannot necessarily be relied on to be sisterly, or motherly come to that.

There is a coruscating scene here where Helen’s pregnant daughter Hermione (Emma Monnickendam) confronts the mother she has not seen for a decade. Some moments are laugh-out-loud funny. As one of Mario’s acolytes lies bleeding, stabbed by Helen, she observes: “None on the carpet, though, so that’s a win.”

Later, the wounded man will opine to Dani that she’ll never overthrow the patriarchy if strategic discussions are interrupted by “a ten-minute conversation on whether you should get a f*cking fringe”. Memon, an intensely focused performer, briefly touches her hairline at this: one of many keenly observed details in Spirling’s production. (Theatre is always slow to catch up to contemporary reality: I think this is the first play I’ve seen where characters vape.)

Memon is wonderful here, as are Dockery and Aikman. Playing Helen of Troy is a challenge for any actress and Dockery’s estuary version is dry and peremptory, wearied by the curse of her beauty. Aikman gets the lioness’s share of laughs as the yappy Cee but she is also profoundly moving when contemplating Lydia’s fate.

Spirling got the script for Bloodsport when she was running Theatre503 and it’s turned into a coup for her new berth as artistic director of Stratford East. This theatre has always wavered between serving a local audience and competing with London’s more central producing houses. With this and the preceding shows she programmed, Here There are Blueberries and Choir Boy, Spirling makes a confident bid for the latter.