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by Margaret Atwood, directed by Kelly Thornton

Nightwood Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto

January 12-29, 2012

“Atwood Puts the ‘Odd’ Back into Odyssey”

Nightwood Theatre is presenting the Toronto premiere of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad with an impressive all-Canadian cast.  It had its world premiere at Stratford-upon-Avon in 2007 and its Canadian premiere in Ottawa the same year with a half Canadian, half British cast.  It would be a pleasure to hail the work as a masterpiece, but it has too many internal inconsistencies and for all the apparatus of Greek drama such as the use of a chorus, it ultimately falls into the tired mode of adapted fiction--i.e., narrator-tells-own-life-via-selected-dramatized-episodes.   

The play and novella purports to tell story of The Odyssey from Penelope’s point of view.  While her husband Odysseus was away from Ithaca for twenty years--ten fighting in the Trojan War and another ten trying to return home after being blown off course--Penelope stayed home and manage her husband’s realm in his absence.  When he did not return when the other Greek heroes did after the Trojan War, rumours began that he was dead which drew uninvited suitors to Ithaca hoping to win the now wealthy Penelope.  To put off their advances she devised the now famous scheme of saying she could not wed until she had woven the shroud for Odysseus’ father.  She wove during the day and would undo what she wove at night.  When Odysseus finally does return in disguise, he slays all the suitors but also slays twelve of Penelope’s maids who, in yielding to the suitors’ desires, he thinks have defiled his home.

Despite her intentions, Atwood actually hews quite close to the information given in The Odyssey.  Where she differs is in imagining that Penelope is haunted by the deaths of her maids even in the afterlife where we now find her.  The play thus has two focuses--one to show what Penelope’s life was like before marriage and during her long years of waiting and to explain why she feels guilt about the maids’ deaths.  This double focus is also part of the problem.  Penelope laments in a typically politically correct way that the maids are among those that have no voice.  Yet, centring the action on Penelope’s life gives them no voice either.  The maids form the chorus in Atwood’s play, but if the play really followed the Greek model, as in Euripides’ Trojan Women, the maids, not Penelope, would be the narrator.  Atwood thus could have chosen to give them a voice, but did not.

The problem is compounded by Kelly Thornton’s staging.  Penelope (Megan Follows) enters alone to tell us (supposedly on the other side of the river Styx) her story.  In telling her story the maids play various characters in her life.  What Thornton has left totally unclear is whether these are the ghosts of Penelope’s maids who are helping her re-enact scenes from her life or whether the scenes from her life are just illustrative flashbacks in her mind as she narrates.  When the maids finally appear at the end as themselves, they cannot speak and Penelope says that they never stay near her long since they feel she betrayed them.  Therefore, we have to conclude in retrospect that the scenes of Penelope’s life must merely be flashbacks.  Thornton, however, confuses the issue by having the maids frequently use ropes with nooses are props--as skipping ropes or as the threads of the shroud Penelope is weaving.  If the maids can’t speak, who then is this group of women?

Beside this structural issues there is a problem of causality and blame.  When the suitors grow increasingly uncontrollable, Penelope prays to Athena, Odysseus’ protector, to bring him home soon.  She then remarks that human prayers are useless since the gods seem to pick and choose which ones they answer and, in fact, seem to enjoy human suffering.  Why then does Atwood allow Penelope to blame Odysseus (Kelli Fox) for her suffering?  Atwood tries to make Odysseus’ ten-year voyage seem to be of his own choosing because she pointedly fails to mention that it is Poseidon who blows Odysseus off course in revenge for the hero’s slaying of his son the Cyclops.  Why, in a world she acknowledges is ruled by fickle gods and goddesses, should Penelope assume that he is acting of his own accord?  Instead of this theological double standard, why not have Penelope see that Odysseus’ twenty-year absence is suffering sent by the gods both for her and her husband?  Atwood mentions only that Penelope is traditionally renowned for her patience, yet she is also renowned for her cleverness, and it would seem fairer to see that both husband and wife survive their different trials because of their cleverness.

Atwood would like Penelope’s guilt to stem from Penelope’s bonding with her servants and her failure to tell her son Telemachus or Odysseus’ nurse Eurycleia that the maids have been helping her by suffering various indignities at the hands of the suitors.  Why Penelope does not tell them once she devises her plan of a competition among the suitors to string Odysseus’ bow is not clear and appears very artificial.

Despite all this, The Penelopiad is well performed.  Follows has down perfectly Atwood’s customary wry sense of humour.  It is the text’s problem that she speaks with such irony and the show contains so much comedy that it’s hard to believe that she is supposed to be racked with guilt over the maids’ deaths.  Fox is so expert at conveying the swagger and wiliness of Odysseus that she really should be allowed to play other roles traditionally played by men.  Fox played Hamlet at the Geva Theatre in Rochester, New York, and if Seana McKenna can play Richard III as she did last year at Stratford, we should certainly have the chance to see Fox’s Hamlet here in Canada.  As Telemachus, Bahia Watson conveys all the impatience and frustration of an adolescent boy.               

If Penelope feels solidarity with her maids, she doesn’t feel it with other women.  She views Eurycleia as a meddler, given a comic narrow-mindedness by Patricia Hamilton.  She detests her cousin Helen, played with wonderfully self-conscious sensuousness by Pamela Sinha.  She can’t stand her mother-in-law Anticleia, played rather like a doddering Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey by Sarah Dodd.  Penelope’s mother is the naiad Peribeoa, who, unsurprisingly, is as changeable as the element she represents.  Though Penelope makes fun of her mother’s short attention span, she still takes the advice she first mocked to heart.  Tara Rosling is excellent at making Peribeoa both regal, divine and bubble-headed at the same time.

Denyse Karn’s costumes are a constant pleasure--from the Penelope’s wrapped-like-a-package wedding dress, to Periboea’s flowing blue gown, to the housekeeper Eurycleia’s jacket spangled with keys of every sort.  Monica Dottor’s choreography is not quite as imaginative as it should be, and Thornton’s pacing is sluggish.  When The Penelopiad opened in Britain it ran only 105 minutes without intermission.  Here in Toronto is runs 120 minutes not including an intermission which ruins the flow of the action. 

Obviously, Atwood fans will not want to miss this show.  Frequent theatre-goers will delight in seeing thirteen of Canada’s finest female actors on stage together.  Even if the play itself and the production are not quite as good as assembled cast, it is an eye-opener to see an ancient subject played by an all-female cast.  Ancient Greek and Roman drama and English plays up to 1660 were played by all-male casts.  The great success of the present cast in both male and female roles makes one hope that Nightwood, or possibly even Stratford, will explore classic repertory with all-female casts in the future.     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Tara Rosling, Cara Gee, Monica Dottor, Pamela Sinha, Sophia Walker, Christine Brubaker, Raven Dauda, Kelli Fox, Bahia Watson and Megan Follows. ©2012 Robert Popkin.

For tickets, visit www.buddiesinbadtimes.com.