Women of Troy

Inside the ruined city of Troy - here imagined by Mitchell and designer Bunny Christie as a grubby industrial port building - a group of women, their husbands killed, anxiously await their fates Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Hecuba, played here by Kate Duchene (second-left), is told that she is to dragged off by the Greek general Odyssesus as his prize ... Photograph: Tristram Kenton

... while her daughter Cassandra (Sinead Matthews) is to become the sex slave of his colleague Agamemnon Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey

Driven partly mad by a curse that enables her to see the future, Cassandra foresees her own death Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey

Each and every one of the women, it turns out, is to be handed over to the Greeks – a grim echo of the origins of the Trojan War itself, in which Helen (Susie Trayling) leaves her Greek husband (Stephen Kennedy) for a Trojan lover Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Worse is to come: the princess Andromache (Anastasia Hille) is told that her baby boy is to be thrown off the walls of the city because her new Greek master, Neoptolemus, has no intention of bringing up another man's son Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Mitchell's production is full of atmospheric, filmic touches, the action often pausing entirely as the women dance in a group, as if in mourning for their former lives Photograph: Tristram Kenton

As they depart en masse, one of the play's final images is the pregnant figure of Andromache passing silently across the stage Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The final scene; the last woman remaining in Troy, Ileana (Pandora Colin), readies herself for the end Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey