Atwood's Penelopiad On Stage

Canada's National Arts Centre and Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company to collaborate on world premiere.

Dec 19, 2006 Mike Mackenzie

Margaret Atwood's novel The Penelopiad comes to the stage through an unusual international theatrical collaboration.

Yesterday at Toronto's elegant Carlu, Peter Hinton (Artistic Director of Canada’s National Arts Centre English Theatre) made a big announcement, along with Deborah Shaw, Associate Director of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company and acclaimed Canadian author Margaret ("Long-Pen") Atwood. Here it is: the NAC and the RSC will be collaborating on the world premiere of a play based on Atwood’s novel The Penelopiad. Shaw explained that the RSC, which is just wrapping up its Complete Works Shakespeare marathon, is now moving into a series of classic plays in contemporary interpretation, with the Scottish Play and Ionesco's avant-garde Macbett, followed by The Penelopiad.

The story is a retelling of the final books of Homer's Odyssey, in which Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, is finally reunited with her long-absent husband Odysseus. But Atwood turns the spotlight away from the returning hero to focus on Penelope's twelve handmaidens, who, Homer reports, were killed by Odysseus when he slaughtered the men who'd been hanging around the palace in hopes of wedding Penelope and gaining the throne in her husband's absence. In fact, the genesis of the whole project, said Atwood, was "because of the maids. It bothered me when I was 16. It wasn't fair."

Atwood characterizes the stage adaptation as "cabaret", saying that it's a form that allows for a flexible, free approach to the mix of music and drama. She points out that "the chorus pieces in the book are from all different styles and times of poetry".

The clumsily named Penelopiad opens in July 2007 at Stratford-upon-Avon in England and moves to the NAC in Ottawa in mid-September 2007. The all-female cast will include seven Canadian actors and six from the Royal Shakespeare Company. The director had not been named at the time of the announcement.

(Incidentally, I chatted briefly with Atwood about the title, which even she admits is difficult to pronounce. Her preference is for the accent to fall on the penultimate syllable, thus "pe-ne-lo-PEE-ad", as opposed to "pe-ne-LOPE-yad".)

Photo: Atwood at the announcement

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