The Penelopiad review – move over, Odysseus! Margaret Atwood lets Penelope’s maids run riot

Margaret Atwood's stage adaptation of "The Penelopiad" has returned to York Theatre Royal with a fresh take on Homer's Odyssey, centering voices traditionally pushed to the margins. The production, adapted from Atwood's own novella, flips the familiar story by making Penelope's brutally killed maids the moral heart of the performance.

Amelia Bullmore plays Penelope as a wry, measured presence. But the production's power lies with the eight-strong chorus of maids, whose perspective animates the entire evening. These women, hanged by Odysseus upon his return, were silenced in classical accounts. Here they reclaim agency by acting out episodes from Penelope's life while interjecting with their own bitter commentary on the men and events that defined her world.

Sara Perks's design creates an austere Hades as the play's setting, a sterile, featureless space stripped of the mess and passion of living life. Thick blood-red ropes crisscross the stage, serving double duty: they evoke the narrative threads Penelope wove during her long wait, and the cords used to hang the maids. The visual metaphor ties the women's fates inextricably to the story's central drama.

The narrative sweeps across Penelope and Odysseus's marriage, his departure for Troy, and the decades of waiting that followed. Rather than a straightforward retelling, Atwood's version interrogates who gets to tell Homer's story and whose voices disappear in the telling. The timing of this revival follows Christopher Nolan's recent film focus on the Odysseus legend, making Atwood's feminist reframing particularly pointed. The play argues that if Penelope's own voice has been sidelined in literary tradition, the maids' experiences have been erased entirely.

The chorus becomes the protagonist of moral reckoning, a collective witness that refuses to let the brutality of their deaths pass unexamined. Their presence transforms "The Penelopiad" from a story about one woman's fidelity into a story about systemic silencing and the cost of male heroism on those deemed disposable.