THEATRE REVIEW:
THE PENELOPIAD

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
13 JAN 2012
R: 4/5

There are, wags assure us, three sides to every story: his side, her side and the truth. In the case of Homer’s Odyssey, however, it seems Greece’s blind bard concentrated almost exclusively in the telling of the story of the marriage of Odysseus, hero of the Trojan War, and his long-suffering wife, Penelope, on the male’s side of the story — as witnessed by the story’s title.

But now, a few thousand years after Homer either spun his yarn or wrote it down, Canada’s own beloved bard, Margaret Atwood, takes up the torch to tackle the distaff side of the timeless tale, finally giving voice to the woman forced to keep the home fires burning when her husband carelessly angers the god Poseidon and is forced to spend a decade and more getting home from the war. Or at least, that’s what he claimed.

Atwood’s work, which first saw the light of day as a novella titled THE PENELOPIAD, quickly morphed into a stage-play under the same name — and now, after productions in Ottawa and Britain, it finally made its Toronto première Thursday in a production from Nightwood Theatre.

With Megan Follows in the title role, it, perhaps not surprisingly, relies heavily on the Greek model, even while it mocks it, sending it up with great if sardonic affection as part of the whacky world o’ men. Set in Hades and environs sometime after the death of all its protagonists, it’s a familiar tale, despite being viewed through a new prism, as the deceased Penelope, tired of being used as “a stick to beat other women,” reclaims her story and tells it from her perspective. The first half of the two-hour tale delves into her childhood, her subsequent marriage to the short-shanked Odysseus (beautifully, even brilliantly played by Kelli Fox) and the affairs leading up to the Trojan War, with Pamela Sinha, doing a particularly delicious and bitchy take on the divine Helen.

Act II, meanwhile, concentrates on Penelope’s stalwart post-war defence of the marriage bed, against the importuning of a bevy of suitors, eager to take over the kingdom of the missing and presumed dead Odysseus. Woven throughout the story, however, is the under-told tale of the 12 handmaidens who aided and abetted Penelope in the warp and weft of her plotting, only to be unceremoniously strung-up by the returning Odysseus, a tragic misstep for which a less-than-trusting Penelope and her competition with the aged Eurycleia (Pat Hamilton) must share the blame.

In tackling the admittedly unconventional structure of the story, director Kelly Thornton marshals a strong sense of high theatricality and uses it to maximum effect, often aided by Denyse Karn’s fanciful costume designs and her simple sets and the assured lighting design of Kimberly Purtell.

But while Thornton draws fine work from Follows and her 12-member chorus (Maev Beaty, Christine Brubaker, Raven Dauda, Sarah Dodd, Monica Dottor, Dara Gee, Tara Rosling, Sophia Walker and Bahia Watson round out the cast), she fails finally to fuse the diverse elements of Suba Sankaran’s music and Dottor’s choreography into her storytelling so that they sprout organically from the tale instead of merely being appended to it, like the shoulder horns sported by Penelope’s suitors.

That said, these should be considered minor flaws indeed, in a production that is, by and large, a triumph, not merely in its determination to bring history to life, but in its success at redrawing and humanizing it as well. In the end, it rings with a lot more human truth (his, hers or ours) than old Homer’s Odyssey ever did.