Review: Beautiful Evil Things at Liverpool Everyman ****

History, as another play about a much-maligned character reminded me this week, is written by the victors.

It’s also been largely written through the ages by men and about men. And the women who do appear in its pages are often painted as either harlots, harpies, passive victims, or just somehow…lesser.

So it’s refreshing to watch a show which looks to redress some of the balance in a narrative that, while featuring plenty of male characters, is big on ‘herstory’, revisiting the tales and legends of Ancient Greece to present them from a female perspective.

Ad Infinitum’s Beautiful Evil Things plunges its audience into the mythical world of the Greek gods, and the heart of the Trojan wars, viewed by the (here) much-maligned Medusa, and told with fierce energy and plenty of wry, witty asides by co-creator Deborah Pugh.

It’s a bravura solo performance that transports you to the simmering, dry heat of the Aegean coast as the Greeks and Trojans go head-to-head over Helen, of face that launched a thousand ships fame, with bloody results.

You don’t need to have a working knowledge of Homer or Aeschylus (or indeed to have visited World Museum Liverpool’s Return of the Gods exhibition) to enjoy the tales of Gods and humans, although it doesn’t hurt.

In Pugh and co-creator (and director) George Mann’s ‘reframing’, the Gorgon Medusa – who, with her sisters Stheno and Euryale, were tasked with chronicling history – falls foul of Zeus and is punished by his daughter Athena (goddess of war), being turned into a mortal with wings, snakes for hair and a gaze that turns all it falls on into stone.

Murdered by Perseus, her head is given to Athena who fastens it to her shield and carries Medusa into battle where she continues to bear witness to history.

The Greek myths are pretty high octane anyway, and this is gripping, heightened storytelling as Pugh’s Medusa gives a blow by blow (literally) account of Amazon queen and warrior wonderwoman Penthesilea’s battle with Achilles outside the gates of Troy; shines the spotlight on the Trojan priestess Cassandra – cursed after spurning Apollo, and later raped by Ajax, and finally takes us into the home of Clytemnestra, sister of Helen and wrathful wife of the Mycenae king Agamemnon.

Medusa has little time for the Gods whose lives are entwined with these women, and – while some might cry ‘misandrist’ – for the most part, who can blame her?

Her boyfriend Poseidon is, we’re told in confiding asides, ‘an absolute personality vacuum’, Ajax is ‘a sh*tbag’, Zeus a ‘lifelong misogynist’, Perseus sneaky, Apollo ghastly and the pillaging Agamemnon unspeakably awful.

Evening the balance somewhat, she also doesn’t have any time for Athena, painted her as a Vichy feminist/handmaid of the patriarchy who appears happy to do her father’s dirty work for him. But can the Goddess redeem herself before Medusa’s story ends?

Gods and monsters, heroes and villains, it’s a heady mix and – set against a practically bare and blacked out stage – it makes for a rip-roaring yarn with added food for thought.