Michelle Dockery, best known for playing Lady Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey, has joined the cast of a new stage play, Bloodsport, earning a four-star review from critic Patrick Marmion.
The production is the latest work from British playwright Ava Pickett, whose writing has taken aim at what Marmion described as the misery of misogyny throughout history. In Bloodsport, Pickett turns her attention to the story of Helen of Troy, with Dockery playing Helen opposite Gerard Monaco as Mario, a modern stand-in for the Greek warrior Agamemnon.
In Greek mythology, Helen was said to be the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, and her abduction by the Trojan prince Paris is the event traditionally said to have triggered the decade-long Trojan War recounted in Homer's Iliad. Pickett's play unfolds in a world torn apart by civil war, with Mario returning home in triumph after recovering his brother's wayward wife, Helen, who is blamed for setting off the ten-year conflict.
Dockery makes her entrance into Mario's designer pad wearing silk lingerie still spattered with blood from the rescue operation, which the play places just off the M25. The homecoming turns into a celebration of champagne and mozzarella sticks before Mario and his brother Marcus head out to the pub.
Left alone, Dockery's Helen reconnects with Mario's wife, Cee, played by Laura Aikman. The two were old sparring partners on nights out before Cee eloped with a "pretty boy" named Paris. When accused of having slept with him in a toilet, Helen corrects the record: "It was the cloakroom."
From Tudor England to Ancient Greece
Pickett made her name with her debut play, 1536, which was staged at Islington's Almeida Theatre before transferring to the West End this year with Barbie star Margot Robbie on board as a producer. Robbie called 1536 the best play she had ever read.
For Bloodsport, Pickett has moved her focus back to ancient Greece, though she remains uninterested in historical accuracy. Instead, she leans into freewheeling anachronism, setting her version of the Helen of Troy story among Essex gangland families in a style that recalls Martina Cole's gangster novels alongside Steven Berkoff's taste for stylised, profane dialogue.
Helen's Fight to Redeem Her Reputation
As the story develops, Dockery's Helen swaps her negligee for black battle fatigues and sets out to redeem her reputation, though Marmion noted her exact objective remains somewhat vague. He wrote that Dockery commands the stage "like an avenging Reverend Mother," drawing, he said, on the same alpha-female presence and long hard stare that defined her role as Lady Mary in Downton Abbey, the period drama in which Dockery starred across its original television run before it continued as a film franchise.
To honour that mission, Helen must also repair her relationship with Cee, who Marmion said soon sheds her image as a stereotypical trophy wife teetering in red stilettos. Complicating things further is the return of Helen's own guilty secret: her sharp-tongued, now pregnant teenage daughter, Hermione, played by Emma Monnickendam, whom Helen had abandoned as a child.
A Wider Cast of Characters
The women's plans are upended by the arrival of Dani, a militant revolutionary feminist played by Maimuna Memon.
Marmion praised Pickett for extending sympathy even to her male characters, singling out Monaco's Mario, whom he described as "a Grade 1 Andrew Tate style misogynist." He reserved particular praise for Ethan Moorhouse, who plays a storytelling chorus character that narrates the action from an Essex pub and car park, describing England as being "six pints in and spoiling for a fight."
