Troy has been sacked, and many men killed. Written in 415 BC, Euripides’s tragedy Women of Troy tells the story of the grieving widows left behind.

In a separate play, Euripides focuses on Hecuba, the Queen of Troy. Now award-winning poet Glyn Maxwell has combined the two plays in a brand new adaptation called After Troy, which is receiving its world premiere at the Oxford Playhouse.

“I’ve mixed them up,” Maxwell, pictured, told me. “The project began not with me, but with the director, Alex Clifton.

“We’d done a workshop together at RADA about imprisoned women encircled by victorious powerful men. Obviously it had a contemporary feel because of the fallout from Iraq and so on.

“I’m not a particular believer in fate, but I like the way projects come from out of the blue. I didn’t get the classics at school or at university [Oxford then Boston], so I went and immersed myself, and felt, ‘I really want to tell this story again my way’. It’s having that sort of reckless bravado that I really enjoy.”

As he inter-mixed the plays, did Maxwell invent any new characters, or did he stick to the Euripides originals?

“I’ve turned a walk-on messenger in Euripides into quite a considerable part. So my three Greek men are Agamemnon, Talthybius, and then the messenger Kratos, which is a name I’ve given him.

“He represents the rank and file while Talthybius is a middle-class, civil service-type bureaucrat. Agamemnon obviously represents the ruling class. The women are all in mythology, and all in Euripides. So I haven’t really invented characters, more developed them in certain ways.”

Advance publicity for After Troy — a co-production by Lifeblood Theatre, the Oxford-based Onassis Programme, and the Oxford Playhouse — describes Maxwell’s play as: “A contemporary and witty retelling of Women of Troy and Hecuba”.

The subject matter doesn’t obviously lend itself to wit, I suggested.

“I’m very aware right now of how brutal it is,” Maxwell replied. “Two days ago I came in to the tail-end of a rehearsal, I caught the last half-hour. It was like a battle scene, there were people broken down, tears, exhaustion.

“If you ask well-trained, sensitive actors to imagine grief, murder, and poking people’s eyes out — it’s not gruelling for a writer in the same way as it is for an actor trying to dig those feelings out.

“The wit, I think, is mostly around the men. They’re really bored because they’re waiting for the wind to blow, they want to get home to Greece. I think I’ve created a strong thread of sarcasm, of gallows humour.

“I’ve got other running jokes as well. I thought I’d have the Trojans as an oral culture, and the Greeks as a written culture, so the Trojans don’t understand what paper is — when Talthybius brings out pieces of paper, the Trojans are frightened because paper always brings them bad news.

“They can’t get their heads round the technology at all, like some people with computers nowadays.

“None of this stuff is in the sources I used, because I have tried to write in the shape of an English play. I don’t think a Greek play is in my blood.”

So was it, I asked, Shakespeare that inspired him to become a poet in the first place?

“The first poet I remember being excited by was Edward Lear, so I was quite young. That was what got me excited about what you could do with rhyme, and telling stories. The Dong with a Luminous Nose for instance.

“Then came Byron and Auden. It’s a part of every writer: the stuff you love, you’re sorry that poet is dead now, and can’t write anything new. It’s almost subconscious — you start trying to do it yourself.”

lAfter Troy continues at the Oxford Playhouse until Saturday. Tickets: oxfordplayhouse.com or 01865 305305.