Euripides’s play Helen, staged at Shakespeare’s Globe in a new version by Frank McGuinness, is set seven years after the end of the Trojan War. 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?

Helen playwright McGuinness had his version of another Greek drama, Oedipus, staged at the National Theatre in 2008, with Ralph Fiennes in the lead role. Among his other Greek adaptations are Hecuba and Phaedra, both staged at the Donmar Warehouse. In addition to adaptations of work by Chekhov, Brecht and Ibsen, McGuinness’s own work includes There Came A Gypsy Riding, Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me.

Penny Downie, who plays Helen, most recently appeared as Gertrude in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet. Her previous credits also include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale and Macbeth with the RSC, Dinner and Henry V at the National Theatre, Death And The Maiden at the Duke of York’s theatre and An Ideal Husband at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

The Shakespeare’s Globe production of Helen, the theatre’s first foray into full-scale Greek drama, is a world premiere.