Amid a surge of public interest in Greek myths comes a theatrical reimagining
of one of its most famed figures – with a major twist.

‘Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy’ follows the return of Helen after her capture, but makes the bold leap of exchanging Ancient Greece for modern day Essex, the Trojan War for an English civil war, a grand palace for an all-white living room, libations for pink gin.

Written by Ava Pickett, and directed by Lisa Spirling, this adaptation has the clear intention of utilising myth to pair modern attitudes to gender and family with the ancient, and also test how well ideas of fate, free will and even the gods can be applied to our own times.

The play begins, and is regularly punctuated by, a messenger in a vest and Adidas trackies, who informs us that Zeus created Essex, and that a ten year civil war has torn England apart.

One of the most successful elements of the play - performed with gritty energy by Ethan Moorhouse – the messenger’s commentary ties together Ancient and modern patriarchal attitudes, and blends the poetic with the vulgar. He at once calls ‘England a fickle fucker’, and labels the ‘architect of the apocalypse not a god, but a woman.’

The feminist framing of the story becomes clear when the action takes hold, action which takes place entirely in the Essex house of the victors.

After some comic interplay between housewife Cee (Laura Aikman) and house help Dani (Maimuna Memon), Helen is brought home by her husband Marcus – think ‘Menelaus’ – and Cee’s husband, Mario, who carries his biceped bulk across the stage with brutal machismo.

Helen (Michelle Dockery) is splattered in blood and visibly shaking, and her trauma and truncated dialogue undercuts the otherwise celebratory atmosphere. The image of Helen as a captive works very well here.

The central twist occurs once the husbands leave to go to the local pub for victory drinks, and Helen, with the help of Dani and a handful of other all-female, masquerading revolutionaries, overpowers her armed guard and takes control of the house.

From here on in, Helen is transformed into an action heroine. The tone becomes vastly more bellicose, and the windows of the house are boarded up with plywood to apparently defend against the inevitable return of the husbands. Dani has also been subverted: instead of a hoover she is now carrying a pistol, and she is eager to use it.

But it is here that the problems of the play begin to emerge. There are essentially two tones at play: on the one hand you have the comic, all-swearing, Essex-twanged dialogue, and on the other is the elegant, classical style, imbued with tragedy. And the two clash increasingly as the play goes on.

It is hard to be convinced by this story and this world when there is so much comedy, and when anxieties about blood stains – ‘It’s not on the carpet, so that’s a win’ – are followed by revolutionary slogans: ‘until the ground is rich and the seas are level.’

There is another barrier to total belief in this story, and which comes about from this same clash between the modern and the ancient: in today’s society, is it really possible for a country to go to war for a woman?

Although there are echoes of current, real-world political strife in England - riots, hotel break-ins, rampant xenophobia (Clacton is even given a mention) – there is never really a sufficient explanation of how the civil war came about.

There are attempts to make it more believable. Paris, who steals Helen from Marcus on a night out, is described as foreign: ‘Paris isn’t English. Not properly. Not in the way he needs to be.’ And this seems to have driven the energy to mobilise an army: ‘England was under threat, by people like Paris.’

But it isn’t enough to be convincing. And so the personal drama, particularly the conflict between Cee and Helen regarding whether to leave an abusive relationship or survive it, although affecting, ultimately feels weightless.

The background lines of the plot are faint. There is a girl named Lydia, who doesn’t appear on stage, but whose death has complex private and public implications.

The guard, who is one of the few visible connections in the play to the wider world, has a confrontation with Dani, but it is difficult to gather how and why he is in allegiance against them.

When the drunken husbands return to the house to an ambush, and there is a tense stand-off between the husbands and their gun-wielding wives, the climax resolves in a bloodbath. Dani arrives on the stage and shoots them all, Helen included.

But unlike the typical bloody revenge finale, there is an inconceivable logic to Dani’s killing spree, particularly her murder of Helen: ‘I thought she’d be less normal. Less caught up in her own life.’ Is an absence of revolutionary fervour justification for cold-blooded murder?

‘Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy’ is an ambitious project, and the feminist inventions can be sharp at times - ‘It is a violent thing, a woman saying “no”’ – but it does ultimately raise the question of whether myths are just too distant, too alien, to meld with modern reality.