by Margaret Atwood
Directed by Kelly Thornton
A Nightwood Theatre Production
at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
January 10-29, 2012

             Margaret Atwood has recorded her dissatisfaction with the Homeric representation of Penelope in The Odyssey, and has elected to retell the myth from the points of view of the patient, chaste wife and her twelve maids. Her Penelopiad includes episodes drawn from mythic material not used by Homer: Penelope’s childhood, marriage, and the slanderous rumours about her. Originally conceived by Atwood as a composition for two voices (Penelope’s and the Chorus of Maids who were ordered hanged by Odysseus after he killed the loutish suitors), the play is certainly not high or even low tragedy. Rife with comedy (often in a deadpan, ironic way), it is saturated with literary burlesque in the sense of subversive mimicry or parody, and, indeed, in the second half it even shakes its mischievous head at Greek satyr plays that often accompanied tragedy. So it is parasitic only to be creatively critical—and entertaining, if an audience is open to clever jokes, distinctive and artful use of language and situation, deflationary action, and travesty (cross-dressing for an often savage satiric purpose). Atwood’s use of vernacular English is itself a subversion of any expectation of a high tone, and Kelly Thornton’s superb all-female production, stocked with excellent performances from thirteen actresses, ensures that an audience will derive a crystal clear feminist perspective about what it meant to be a woman in a brutally patriarchal world.

My praise does not, however, mean that I find the play completely successful even on its own terms. The Maids’ first song is contaminated with naïve rhymes, and the dialogue has such a contemporary North American texture that the female characters sound more like television’s Desperate Housewives than Greeks from any era, classic or modern. Though Atwood skilfully weaves together her spiky view of Odysseus and Penelope with the Homeric material, her play has deeper intellectual merit than dramatic. The Maids are shape-shifters and the various styles with which they are presented in the course of the action prevent them from counting for very much when it comes to pathos and catharsis. They remain theatrical conventions and resources rather than full-fledged human beings—as, in fact, do Odysseus, Helen, Telemachus, and even Penelope.

            Most of the London and Toronto reviews are heavy with praise for the theatricality, and, indeed, the present production shows that it is possible to be spectacularly effective without expensive laser or multi-media technology that often saturates a Robert Lepage production to the detriment of all else. The play opens with a huge metal gate slowly rising in clouds of mist in Hades and the figure of white-robed Penelope (Megan Follows) striding slowly forward. After mimicking statuary poses of Penelope, Follows speaks like a voice from the dead. She reflects on her long absent husband, whom she claims has made a fool of her and gotten away with it, and she blames herself for having turned a blind eye to his crafty excuses because she had wanted a happy ending. Reminding us that she is the daughter of a King and Naiad mother, she is both regal and adaptive. Like water, she can go around any obstacle, and the play substantiates this claim. No one needs any reminding that Follows is a beautiful, versatile actress who can be at home in anything from Coward to Shakespeare, Caryl Churchill to Chekhov. She has grace, poise, and wonderful modulation, and she is pitch-perfect with Atwood’s tone, moving from cool dignity to catty irony, from sombre reflection to lewd wit. This Penelope knows all too well that she has to be a perfect actress in order to put off the lusty suitors and pretend to her returning husband that she has never wavered in her fidelity to him. In other words, she knows the rules for women in her era, as she also knows how to subvert those rules by her own patient cunning.

            Playwright and director give her and the rest of the cast plenty of scope by which to play on various registers of voice and emotion, but the style is usually dangerously broad. But this is the very point: Atwood and Thornton are in intriguing symbiotic relationship as they construct a theatrical world where a society is satirized for victimizing women. Atwood’s feminism skews her subjects. In this play, women are all subjugated from childhood. Sex for them is bloody and painful, and marriage is little more than sanctioned rape. Child-bearing is painful too, and child-rearing has its own trials. And women are never to be thanked or honoured in a way that does justice to them. So when they get to mock men, these women react with special relish, turning the play into a feminist revenge comedy.

Besides the brilliant Follows, there are twelve other actresses who run their paces with aplomb, even though there are times when they are compelled to be grotesquely weird. The Maids hop, skip rope, bob up and down, launch into lamentations or comic songs, serve as Chorus, and indulge in audacious parody of docile women yielding to class and sexual humiliation or of randy men chasing after provocative Helen while clasping huge, throbbing rubber phalluses. They also double in other roles, and though the particular standouts are Maev Beaty as old Laertes, Sarah Dodd as cold, disaffected Anticleia, Monca Dottor as a snake-headed Oracle, Pamela Sinha as carnally flirtatious Helen, Tara Rosling as Naiad in long rippling blue with a light rippling laugh, Bahia Watson as a faultlessly accurate adolescent Telemachus, and Kelli Fox as Odysseus the epitome of masculine cunning, strength, and chauvinism, the others (Christine Brubaker, Raven Dauda, Cara Gee, and Sophia Walker) are all excellent. Their head is old Eurycleia, funny old nursemaid to Odysseus and then Telemachus. Patricia Hamilton knows the type and plays the part to the hilt with a mixture of tenderness and toughness.

What an audience will undoubtedly remember of this production, apart from the performances, are some stunning moments: the first appearance of Penelope in clouds of swirling mist; the transformation of a cloth-covered table into Odysseus’s ship, with Penelope representing its carved prow; long ropes that become a snake or a weaving or instruments for hanging the Maids; Penelope’s Naiad mother in heavenly blue with a long rippling train; the sequence where the Maids pursue Helen like men raging with satyriasis; the foot race that Odysseus wins set to the theme music of Chariots of Fire; and Odysseus’s stringing of his bow and the slaughter of the drunken, licentious suitors. But I shall also remember Kimberly Purtell’s fine lighting, Denyse Karn’s clever costumes, Monica Dottor’s choreography for the Maids, and Suba Sankaran’s eclectic music, strong with Asian influences.

photos: Robert Popkin

pic 1: Megan Follows ({Penelope)

pic 2: Kelli Fox (Odysseus) sets sail

pic 3: Megan Follows (Penelope) and Bahia Watson (Telemachus)



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