While Odysseus spent ten years fighting in the Trojan war and another decade wandering home via the Aegean, Penelope waited on stony Ithaca fending off a host of gluttonous suitors and keeping tabs on her increasingly petulant son, Telemachus. She became emblematic of fidelity, telling suitors she would marry only after weaving a shroud, which she carefully unravelled each night. After returning in disguise, Odysseus slaughtered the suitors and, as an afterthought, hanged twelve of Penelope’s maids in the Greek equivalent of an honour killing. Their crime? Sleeping with the suitors, though being raped by them would be a more apt description.
Atwood’s novel was released as part of The Myths, a series commissioned by Canongate Books retelling classical myths in a “contemporary and memorable way.” The book is not so much an adaptation as a resuscitation of Penelope and her twelve hanged maids, a reminder that for every hero bounding through a narrative there are other patient characters who must wait for their time to speak. Greek myths, Atwood reminds the reader, would be told “one way in one place and quite differently in another.” In the case of The Penelopiad, her fascination with unexplored voices is inspired by a single image from Homer’s version of The Odyssey: the maids’ dangling feet, still twitching as they were hanged. “I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids,” she writes in her introduction. “In The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself.”
Lloyd was busy with her own adaptation issues, namely bringing the musical Mamma Mia! to the screen, so the job was won by Josette Bushell Mingo, an actor, director, and organizer of push, a group that promotes black theatre in the UK. Bushell-Mingo had long relished the darker elements of the Greeks. Through the window of the rehearsal room on this miserable July day, she gesticulates to the group of thirteen actors. Her body language hints at fear and large emotion. There is only one possible end to this particular episode of Greek tragedy: lunch.
A rehearsal room at lunch is a place of lingering residual energy. With the actors gone, the production people bat around ideas between mouthfuls of tuna sandwiches. Veronica Tennant, the movement director and former principal dancer at the National Ballet of Canada, stands by a wall of photocopies of classic Greek poses. Warren Wills, musical director, taps away silently on his keyboard, and Bushell-Mingo paces her set — which at that point consists mostly of scaffolding and loose chairs. She is dressed in black track suit bottoms and a grey hoodie, her short hair interrupted by a grey streak. Bushell-Mingo’s most memorable acting role to date was as Rafiki, the wily mandrill in the London production of The Lion King, and when she starts her impersonation her eyes stretch to a childlike width. Her speech tumbles out with excitement — the diametric opposite of Atwood’s dry precision.
Bushell-Mingo makes it clear that she’s an actor who directs and not someone who approaches projects with a grand, finished vision. She plucks ideas from a wide range of sources. Fight styles from The Matrix and gags from bawdy British comedies of the 1960s mesh with epic acting and a sound design that will imitate arrows whizzing across the room. She stretches ideas out, twangs their elasticity before accepting or rejecting. (“She’ll listen to anything,” one of the actors says. “You’ll talk to her about an idea. She’ll say something that seems unconnected but she’s already three moves ahead.”) At this stage in the process, the ideas are still as shapeless as the rehearsal skirts. The concepts might be ripped up like so much rehearsal tape on the wooden floor of the room, lined out to replicate the dimensions of the Swan theatre. Bushell-Mingo is adamant that the theatre itself be present in the setting, not only because it will be the last production at the Swan before it closes down for renovations, but also because there will be no recreation of Greece here — no pillars, no faux marble columns. The void is important. Atwood has Penelope narrate her story from the afterworld in a state of “bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness.”
“It’s a unique myth,” Bushell-Mingo says, still walking about the room. “We have Odysseus but we also have Penelope’s relationship with Helen of Troy. That’s like Muhammad Ali meets Einstein. We’re not just deconstructing and reconstructing Penelope but all those who came under her gaze.”
rsc associate artist Penny Downie plays Penelope, so the women performing as the twelve maids are responsible for all the remaining roles, from Helen to Odysseus’s nurse Eurycleia to the throng of oafish suitors. The cast will race through costume changes but also rely on smaller attempts at characterization. Earlier in the week, a transgendered woman named Joey came in to the rehearsals to demonstrate how even subtle gestures can be perceived as masculine or feminine. This subtlety gives way, however, in Bushell-Mingo’s garish handling of the scenes where the suitors rape the maids. As the violence unfolds, she’s decided to counter it with an upstage Busby Berkeley sequence. “A girl is getting black-eyed, traumatized, brutalized, and behind we’ve got a fifties microphone and feathers.”
She’s obviously not feeling too shackled to the text. “This is not reverential at all. It’s the spirit I’m after. I was nervous I was somehow not going to be able to capture Penelope. You don’t have to like her but you do have to get her right. And I needed to make sure we saw the humaneness of the twelve girls. I don’t want them to come across as numbers. We need to see what happens when twelve maids hang.”
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