his three-part series enters the hearts and minds of women in Greek and Roman mythology – queens, consorts, wives and witches – who have been traditionally skimmed past in pursuit of adventuring, heroic masculinity. It tells their stories in bite-sized dramatic monologues, and is a welcome theatrical antidote to this second lockdown, cleverly conceived by the Jermyn Street theatre and directed under socially distanced conditions by its artistic director, Tom Littler, alongside Adjoa Andoh and Cat Robey. Every 15-minute drama has been performed and filmed live in a single take and each carries a fluid and energetic sense of real-time performance. The 15 short plays are based on Ovid’s Heroides (The Heroines), and bring us heroines in modern dress, often stranded on their own islands with the sound of gulls and ocean waves in the background. The first set in the series, The Labyrinth, comprises stories, loosely interconnected, of women who fell in love but were left by their errant husbands or lovers and are now giving voice to that grievance. There is a meta-theatrical digression in Samantha Ellis’s story about a woman called Phyllis (Nathalie Armin), when she momentarily stops raging against her betraying lover and turns on Ovid himself. “He called me a heroine but he made me sound miserable,” she says and then reflects on how Heroides is filled with the female pain of abandonment, emotional wounding or rape. It is a keen observation; every woman in The Labyrinth is speaking of herself in relation to the love she has lost and seems inconsolably damaged by it. Their subjectivities are well evoked to show the emotional wreckage that the selfish, unfaithful, adventuring men of ancient mythologies leave in their wake, but there is a certain repetition to the women’s woes as well. But if they are “miserable”, at least they are defiant in this state of distress, empowered by the curses they unleash on to the men who have left them, or the women with whom they have absconded. Bryony Lavery’s opening monologue features Ariadne (Patsy Ferran), who has betrayed her minotaur half-brother for her lover, Theseus. She is an intelligent if overwrought figure, seeking rescue but also revenge. Phaedra is her sister in the next and most compelling drama, written by Timberlake Wertenbaker, and it is the highlight of the set because of Doña Croll’s spellbinding, fully embodied performance as an older woman in love with her husband’s son. Her direct address to him is a thrilling act of persuasion in which she urges him to defy the rules. Dressed in slinky evening gown, Croll cuts a powerful figure as a renegade woman, fearless in the face of her desires. Phyllis, meanwhile, rescues her lover from a shipwreck only to be left by him. Like Natalie Haynes’s beautifully drawn out Hypsipyle (Olivia Williams), who is also abandoned, she berates herself for ever placing her trust in him, and in love, in the first place. Many of these women rage about being shoe-horned into an ill-fated love story when they know they are so much more than defeated lovers. “I never even wanted to fall in love,” says Phyllis, as she takes root and transforms into a tree, while Hypsipyle knocks back the red wine in front of her laptop and sets her curse on the woman who has taken her husband from her. That woman is Medea (Nadine Marshall), a strong, martial figure brought to life by Juliet Gilkes Romero. She does not wish Jason’s new bride any harm but focuses her revenge, in the form of filicide, squarely at Jason himself. The monologues tread the tricky balance between telling each woman’s backstory while also dramatising her interiority in a short space of time, and they all pull us in and resist too much telling on the whole. What stands out above all else in this series is the quality of the writing, which is delightfully literary. It is clear that these are five strong women, all brought down by their trusting hearts, and angry at themselves to degrees as well as the men who betray them. It is this intelligent self-awareness that gives them their power.