I first read Euripides’ Suppliant Women nearly forty years ago with my teacher, Desmond Conacher, to whom first thanks as always are owed. I was at once captivated by this drama, by its modern and gritty feel, by the way ancient myth and contemporary Athens were juxtaposed, by the uneasy feeling that nothing should be taken at face value. The play has lived in the back of my mind for decades, been included from time to time in courses on drama and theatre, and has occasionally attracted a similar enthusiasm from colleagues and students. I say ‘occasionally’, because the play has languished unfairly among the critics, in comparison to popular favourites such as Medea or Bacchae or (more recently) Trojan Women. This is perhaps because it lacks a powerful female protagonist such as Elektra or Medea or Kreousa, or because Euripides is not subjecting the gods to the intense scrutiny of the lens of drama (‘if gods do something shameful, they are not gods’–fr. 292.7), or because, even though the play is about war and the sufferings in war, it does not wrench at the heart in the way that Trojan Women or Iphigeneia at Aulis do. The fact that the Seven were engaged in a war without divine sanction does something to mitigate the anguish, real as it is, of the Argive mothers. Yet I have always placed Suppliant Women high on my list of Euripidean tragedies, and it is reassuring to witness a revival in its fortunes, first through the indispensable commentaries of Collard and Morwood, but especially through the advent of performance criticism. Suppliant Women possesses a number of striking features for actors and director to explore: an extended series of visible events before a word is spoken, an involved