Ava Pickett's new play opens on Helen's first night home from a war fought in her name, with Michelle Dockery as Helen and Laura Aikman as the friend she left behind.
Homer lets Helen come home and spares her the reckoning. In Book IV of the Odyssey she is back at Sparta beside Menelaus, receiving Telemachus, and slips a drug into the wine so that nobody weeps that night, though she has already called what she did the blindness Aphrodite dealt her, drawing her from her country, her bridal chamber and her daughter. Ava Pickett’s new play takes the evening before that composure: the first fragile night of peace, a husband celebrating, and Cee, the childhood friend she walked out on, who is not.
Pickett wrote her first play, 1536, under commission at the Almeida, and set it among three women in Tudor Essex talking as the news of Anne Boleyn’s arrest reaches them. It won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2024, sold out its run and opens in the West End this year. Bloodsport is the second time she has put women in a room together and left the historical event offstage.
It is Lisa Spirling’s first production as artistic director of Stratford East. Michelle Dockery plays Helen and Laura Aikman plays Cee, with Maimuna Memon, Gerard Monaco and Jay Taylor, and Polly Sullivan designs the set and costumes. The cast list is the clearest signal of where Pickett has put the story: standing beside Helen and her daughter Hermione are Mario, Marcus, Dani, Luke and Chloe.