(Taken from my programme notes, for my production with Fulham Opera)
It is ten days since the fall of Troy and the end of the Trojan War. The Trojan War had raged for ten years, the city besieged by Spartan forces led by King Menelaus, who had launched a thousand ships to bring back his wife, Helen, secretly brought by Prince Paris to Troy. With the famous wooden horse, Troy finally fell, and Menelaus recaptured Helen, bringing her aboard his ship, now sailing back to Sparta.
Act I
Poseidon’s palace on an island near Egypt
Aithra, a sorceress, is waiting for her lover, Poseidon, to return to her for dinner. An Omniscient Seashell that he has left with her tells Aithra that Poseidon is in Ethiopia. Her maids try to pacify her with a lotus Potion of Forgetting, but she complains bitterly that she wants company. Suddenly, the Omniscient Seashell gets a vision from the sea – she sees Menelaus, homeward bound on a ship, poised to murder his sleeping wife Helen below deck. To prevent this, Aithra summons a storm to shipwreck them onto her island.
The unhappy couple enter Aithra's great hall, and immediately Helen tries to convince Menelaus to join her for a meal and to act as husband and wife again. Appalled, Menelaus reminds her of her infidelity and threatens to kill her with a sword. The sword has a history: it belonged to Paris before Menelaus disarmed him and murdered him with his own weapon.
Just as he is poised to strike Helen, Aithra, who has been observing all this time, freezes Menelaus and instructs her malicious female elves to plague Menelaus with visions and nightmares. Menelaus hesitates in killing Helena. The elves get to work and soon Menelaus thinks that Paris is alive again, and he runs outside to kill Paris a second time. The elves laugh at him, engaging him in a phantom battle.
Exhausted, Helen collapses, and Aithra heals her back to health and youth. She administers her Potion of Forgetting to soothe her. Helen, amazed by her new friend’s magic, soon becomes sleepy and is put to bed in Aithra’s sleeping chamber.
Menelaus storms back in, thinking he has now killed Paris a second time and also Helen (actually just phantoms created by the elves). Aithra greets him and offers him a soothing drink (secretly the forgetting potion). She also invents a story so that he can reconcile with Helen. She tells him that the real Helen was in fact whisked away to an island ten years before and has been innocently sleeping all this time under Aithra's protection. The wanton Helen who ran off with Paris was in fact a lascivious spirit. (None of this is true and Menelaus initially finds it hard to believe.) She tells him to prepare himself to meet the real Helen who is sleeping in the next chamber.
Menelaus’s anxiety melts into an uncanny calm as the potion has its effect. He is overwhelmed, not knowing how to act, and not thinking himself worthy of this ‘untouched’ Helen, having obsessed about revenge on his wife for ten years. With Aithra’s encouragement he joins Helen in the bedchamber.
Helen is too scared to return to Sparta immediately, however, so Aithra sends Helen and Menelaus to a desert oasis in the Atlas Mountains, so far away that no one will have heard of the famous Helen of Troy. She also sends with them more lotus potion so that they can continue living in this fantasy together. The elves look on with mocking laughter at their mistress’s plan.
Act II
A tented pavilion in an oasis at the base of the Atlas Mountains
After a night of passion, Helen gratefully recounts this ‘second wedding night’. But as morning dawns and Menelaus awakens, the effects of the potion are beginning to wear off. Menelaus is confused about the identity of the woman he is with. He remembers having killed his wife yesterday (actually a phantom conjured by the elves) and believes that the woman who he is with is herself the phantom Helen given to him by Aithra (actually the real Helen of course). Helen realises that living in a drug-dream will not cure Menelaus of his confusion and resolves never to use the lotus potion again.
Suddenly, out of the desert Prince Altair rides in, accompanied by his son Da-ud and his slaves. He reveals he has been sent to protect the couple by Aithra and her sisters. Altair is instantly smitten with Helen, who he has not heard of in this distant land, but instantly recognises her as the most beautiful woman in the world. His son Da-ud is similarly overwhelmed by her divine beauty, and pledges to protect her forever. Menelaus is reminded of Helen amongst the Trojan princes, all of them inflamed with passion for her. At Altair’s suggestion, Menelaus and Da-ud go off to the desert to hunt gazelles.
A disguised Aithra bursts in revealing that her servant erroneously sent Helen off to the desert with a Potion of Recollection, alongside the Potion of Forgetting. Aithra is relieved to find that they haven’t yet drunk the potion as she is convinced that if Menelaus remembers the truth, he will murder Helen. Helen, however, is convinced that this Potion of Recollection is the only thing that will allow a reconciliation with Menelaus.
Altair returns and, while Menelaus and Da-ud are still out hunting, attempts to seduce Helen. In the distance the hunt is seen, and the confused Menelaus kills Da-ud, thinking the young prince to be Paris (thus making this the third time Menelaus thinks he's killed Paris). Menelaus returns with Da-ud’s body. At Helen’s prompting, he slowly realises that he has mistakenly killed an innocent in his attempt to punish Helen. Altair is indifferent to Da-ud’s death, saying he has plenty more sons, and goes off to prepare a feast in Helen’s honour.
Menelaus says he needs to prepare himself for death so that he can join Helen in death and be reunited with his spouse (he still believes that he has murdered the ‘real’ Helen and the woman standing next to him is the phantom Helen). Helen prepares the Potion of Recollection for him, which he takes, thinking it to be a potion of death. As the potion has its effect he suddenly realises that the real Helen stands before him. He prepares once more to kill her, but then a miracle occurs – he sees Helen for who she truly is, not the whore, and not the goddess, but a woman of flesh and blood.
Prince Altair returns, and seeing the couple reconciled, orders that they be seized and Menelaus put in chains. Aithra steps in, summoning Poseidon’s phalanx of soldiers who quickly pacify Altair and his men. Aithra announces the arrival of Helen and Menelaus’s daughter Hermione. The reunited family leave for Sparta.
Guido Martin Brandis
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