Twelve Angry Maids

The hanging scene that grabbed Atwood’s attention is one of the most crucial, and at this stage Bushell-Mingo is still grappling with how to express it. Part of adapting The Penelopiad is capturing the dry tone of the book but also the loose, imaginative nature of its cabaret style. The recent rsc production of King Lear featured the Fool hanged onstage, strung up above the ground and wriggling until his death. Bushell-Mingo will not follow that particular route. “If you have twelve nooses in the theatre,” she says, “you don’t have to hang anyone. You leave them to swing. The maids were hanged from a ship with one rope. After they cleared up the bodies of the suitors, Odysseus was knackered and said to his son, take them out and murder them. They were getting hoisted up — can you see it? — and slowly dying. Penelope could have said something. She didn’t. We need to capture that.”

Bushell-Mingo says she’s not an intellectual director, but that belies the rigour of this adaptation process. There’s a deep, well-worn groove that each piece of new or changed text has travelled down, from its origin in rehearsal to changes in the script back to the assistant director Rae Mcken, who couches it in context and sends it to Atwood. Sometimes the change is immediately accepted. Sometimes it provokes debate. Sometimes it gets a flat-out no. Bushell-Mingo sends Atwood an email every second day. “What I like is that in the retelling of the retelling, we have retold,” she says. “We question Margaret.” There’s a secondary plan if the tempo of communication needs to be increased: “Margaret says, ‘You can call me.’ And I’ll be bloody taking her up on her offer. We’re going to get a webcam in here so I’ll be like, ‘Hey girl. . .’ ”

It’s morning on Pelee Island in Lake Erie. Margaret Atwood has already finished the day’s quota of five pages for her next novel and is ready for a tea break. “They’re not sucking up. They may be saying behind my back ‘Oh, if only we didn’t have to suck up so much,’ but I haven’t noticed them doing it.” At this point the cast has been through six or seven versions of her script, and Atwood’s own adaptation concerns centre on how to add and subtract the varied elements of the story. “The book is discursive. It’s like going through someone’s scrapbook. Things are pasted. Here you’ll find Penelope talking, and suddenly the maids come in and do a little eighteenth-century playlet. Or they do the trial of Odysseus.” Even though they sound well-suited to the stage, these two particular elements simply didn’t work. “The momentum at that point was such that it needed to drive on and get to the next part of the plot.” Atwood’s production notes are full of shuffled scenes and suggestions: “Perhaps Penelope and the Maids could make their first appearances as owls? ” she asks at one point. A novel takes as long as it needs to, and Atwood was acutely aware of the constraints of theatre, even when they tended toward the biological. “What is the maximum amount of time you can do this and hold people’s attention without them also thinking, ‘I really have to go to the bathroom?’ It can be very distracting.”

She’s heard The Handmaid’s Tale sung, seen it on film, as well as The Edible Woman onstage. She’s aware of the pitfalls of what will simply not work in theatre. “There’s a moment in The Ring when the hero comes upon Brunhilde lying in her ring of fire and says in German, ‘Das ist kein Mann,’ which means ‘It’s not a man’ but also ‘It’s not a human being,’ whereas if you translate it into English — ‘This isn’t a man’ — everybody laughs, especially since Brunhilde usually has an enormous chest. Some things just don’t work. They’re funny when they shouldn’t be funny and not funny when they should. You find that in rehearsal. You try it, and the effect is not what you had anticipated.”

Atwood has, in her words, made a “skeletal thing.” In Stratford they are putting the flesh on. “They will have created it. I think it’s moving in a different direction, not necessarily laterally. They’re making a new thing, whatever that thing may be.” But is it a successful example of literary resuscitation? Will the maids now be saved from the dark, forgotten corner of the myth? “We’ll wait and see,” says Atwood. “Never say never.”

Kate Hennig, who plays Eurycleia, among others, has been blogging about the rehearsal process. She once appeared in a children’s play by Atwood and has been reading her novels as they’ve been released. “Myths are repeated at different times in our civilization,” she says. “And this story is some-how up right now. It’s important that it be told from the feminine perspective.”

Some of the younger members of the cast don’t have as much familiarity with Atwood’s work, but they seem just as energized by reviving sidelined characters. In an attempt to catch up, Jenny Young is on her fourth Atwood novel since getting the part. “We’re post-feminists in the Western world,” she says. “In many ways we’re supposedly equal to men in society on paper. Now we have to look back at all the literature for a gazillion years and think, okay, there are so many filters we have to take off from so many stories. For instance, we all know Homer’s Odyssey. What about these characters we forgot about? ”

“I had never thought of these characters,” adds Lisa Karen Cox. “You get cast and go and sit down and read The Odyssey and they’re next-to-never mentioned. If they are it’s always in passing, like how you would talk about cattle. So to know you’re going to get to give it a feminine perspective for the first time — for the first time in a couple of thousand years — is very exciting.”

Weeks later, and the punitive weather in Stratford had only worsened. The homes of two of the British actors were flooded. The water lapped up to within an inch of the door jamb at the house of Pamela Matthews, one of the Canadians. One of the English actors has been replaced, and the Canadians are learning about the hard slog of the technical runs in England. Of course, the crucial hanging scene has gone through a number of changes in an attempt to get that lingering image right.

“Josette went through so many things,” says Philippa Domville, who plays one of the maids. “We had ropes in at one point. She said, ‘We need to use your bodies. We need to do it through a physical movement.’ Now it’s just us. It’s simpler and comes out of the bodies of actors so it’s not contrived. There’s no choking, just movement.” So how do the maids die? “We go up on our toes.