Helen

Seven years have passed since the end of the Trojan War and Menelaus, King of Sparta and husband to Helen, is making his slow and painful way home. When his ship is wrecked on the coast of Egypt he stumbles upon what seems to be his wife lingering outside the royal palace. But if this is the real Helen, who was the beautiful woman stolen by Paris, for whom all Greece took up arms? Did Troy fall for nothing? Has it all been some god's idea of a joke?

Frank McGuinness's version of Euripides' Helen premiered at Shakespeare's Globe, London, in August, 2009.

Euripides (c. 482-406 bc), dramatist of Ancient Greece. Eighteen of some ninety plays attributed to him have survived, among them Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Andromache, Suppliant Women, Electra,Trojan Women, Iphigenia in Tauris, Heracles, Helen, Phoenician Women, Orestes and Bacchae. Frank McGuinness was born in Buncrana, Co. Donegal, and now lives in Dublin and lectures in English at University College Dublin. His plays include: The Factory Girls (Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1982), Baglady (Abbey, 1985), Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (Abbey, 1985; Hampstead Theatre, London, 1986), Innocence (Gate Theatre, Dublin, 1986), Carthaginians (Abbey, 1988; Hampstead, 1989), Mary and Lizzie (RSC, 1989), The Bread Man (Gate, 1991), Someone Who'll Watch Over Me (Hampstead, West End and Broadway, 1992), The Bird Sanctuary (Abbey, 1994), Mutabilitie (NT, 1997), Dolly West's Kitchen (Abbey, 1999; Old Vic, 2000), Gates of Gold (Gate, 2002), Speaking Like Magpies (Swan, Stratford, 2005), There Came a Gypsy Riding (Almeida, London, 2007), Greta Garbo Came to Donegal (Tricycle Theatre, London, 2010), The Match Box (Liverpool Playhouse Studio, 2012), The Hanging Gardens (Abbey, 2013), Donegal (Abbey, 2016), The Visiting Hour (Gate, 2021) and Dinner With Groucho (The Civic, Belfast, 2022). His widely performed versions include Ibsen's Rosmersholm (1987), Peer Gynt (1988), Hedda Gabler (1994), A Doll's House (1997), The Lady from the Sea (2008) and John Gabriel Borkman (2010); Chekhov's Three Sisters (1990) and Uncle Vanya (1995); Lorca's Yerma (1987); Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (1991) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1997); Sophocles' Electra (1998) and Oedipus (2008); Strindberg's Miss Julie (2000); Euripides' Hecuba (2004) and Helen (2009); Racine's Phaedra (2006); Tirso de Molina's Damned by Despair (2012); James Joyce's The Dead (2013); and Molière's Tartuffe (2023).