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Penny downie8/24/2023 ![]() These shifting tones are a virtue in the book but, in the theatre, are disorientating and emotionally misleading.ĭirector Josette Bushell-Mingo has with these surprising elements tried to embrace the novel’s spirit. Moreover, the narrative arc cannot cope with the extreme switching of styles: the maids’ chorus enters as sailors on shore leave from South Pacific one minute and then delivers something akin to an out-take from a Busby Berkley dance number complete with fluttering ostrich feather fans the next. It fails to sustain for the audience a meaningful relationship between Penelope and her maids to suggest her sense of loss and guilt. The result, while full of theatrical invention, commitment and structurally faithful to the original is, though, dramatically unsatisfying. She has, in short, created an allusive collage of Greek theatre in a short story – no doubt why the RSC thought it ripe to pluck from page to stage. The maids appear in the book as if a chorus in Greek tragedy, Penelope’s voice is like a Euripides character with long self-searching monologues and there are elements of burlesque that would not be out of place in an Aristophanic comedy or satyr play that followed the tragedies in Ancient Greece’s drama festivals. Witty and referential, it is a fine companion to Homer and wonderfully theatrical. Their actions, she recalls, stem from her secretly enlisting their help in her stratagems to keep at bay the suitors who are after her hand and her husband’s kingdom. The plot turns on her relationship with her 12 maids and particularly her guilt at their murder by Odysseus when he returns for consorting with his enemies in his absence. In it she assumes Penelope’s perspective, Odysseus’s spouse, left behind when he went off to the Trojan war. The Odyssey has had everything from a Hollywood makeover with Kirk Douglas to a free translation in one day in the life of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Dublin.Ĭanadian author Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novel, The Penelopiad, by comparison, is a slender take on what Aristotle called the comedy of manners. Indeed the blind poet’s oral epics have been a source of inspiration ever since they were written down. Aeschylus said his tragedies were simply crumbs from Homer’s table.
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