The Penelopiad Review: Atwood's Maids Run Riot in York

Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad has returned to York Theatre Royal, with Amelia Bullmore playing a wry Penelope and an eight-strong chorus of slain maids pulling the story's threads. The production arrives after a summer in which Odysseus hogged the spotlight, courtesy of Christopher Nolan's blockbuster take on Homer. Now, as the revival makes plain, it's the women's turn to speak.

Atwood adapted the play from her own novella. The title tells you the subject: the story of Odysseus's famously faithful wife. But the play's sharper ambition lies elsewhere — with Penelope's brutally slain maids, whose perspective the work reclaims. If Penelope's voice has been sidelined by epic tradition, theirs have been silenced altogether.

Where does the story take place?

In Hades. Sara Perks's minimal design renders the underworld as a sterile, featureless place, deliberately drained of the passion and mess of life. The setting works as a kind of waiting room for unfinished grievances.

Thick, blood-red ropes criss-cross the stage. They suggest the strands — literal and narrative — woven by Penelope, and the cords used to hang the maids. One prop, two meanings. That economy is the design's quiet triumph.

Who actually carries the show?

The maids. The eight performers form a chorus (a Greek-drama device: a group that comments on the action), acting out episodes from Penelope's life and interrupting with their own bitter take on events. Bullmore's Penelope may be the name on the poster, but the chorus pulls the story's threads, as the production itself acknowledges in texture if not in billing.

The narrative they unfold covers the essentials: Penelope and Odysseus's marriage, his departure for Troy, and the long, long years that followed. The maids don't narrate so much as dispute, seasoning the household epic with grievances Homer never recorded.

Why revive it now?

The timing does half the marketing. After Nolan's Odysseus dominated the summer conversation, a play that hands the microphone to Penelope and her hanged maids reads less like coincidence and more like corrective. Atwood's feminist revisionism, staged in the shadow of a blockbuster, makes its point simply by existing.

The result at York Theatre Royal is a production where the dead out-talk the living. Given that the maids were strung up by the old version of the story, that seems fair.