Penelope2.0011_Walsh

Penelope2.0011_Walsh

Enda Walsh, Penelope, tragi-comic drama, premiered July 2010, Druid Theatre, Galway, Ireland. Several productions have been staged.

Is there narrative gain in the enigma of Penelope — a representative of worldly achievement that four bankers would long for in a world teetering on financial collapse? Or is it all about male desire/eros and the laughability of old guys hoping to stay in the game? (See McNamara right side-bar.)

Walsh, interviewed for GAFTV, tells that he wrote the play at an invitation for five modern European playwrites to write modern adaptations of classical myth.

Link to trailer for Stockton Theater: click here.

"Don’t be deceived by the seeming stasis of “Penelope,” which has been directed with apt dashes of panache by Mikel Murfi. It’s ostensibly four untoned guys of varying ages killing time in bathrobes and Speedos." P.Marks in Washington Post March 2011

Split image: a woman in a golden swim cap, and a theatrical stage set depicting a poolside scene with four men

A. McNamara (2015), "Dead Men Talking: stagnation and entrapment in Enda Walsh's Penelope," in The Theatre of Enda Walsh, ed. by M.P. Caulfield and I.R. Walsh (Carysfort: Dublin), 151-60. —— The play's action comments figuratively on the historical, great banking scandal of 2008 in which executives of a consortium called Celtic Tiger colluded and very nearly bankrupted the Irish national economy. Penelope's suitors scheme together as bankers would, and the impending return of Penelope's husband is going to result in their deserved demise.

"For a play eponymously named, [it is odd that] Penelope has no lines. Perhaps Walsh used her character as a symbol for the unattainable, and a consequence of the tragedies that will face these men." review at meetsobsession.com

A successful cinematic adaptation of Penelope's plight - not directly related to Walsh's play — is Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963) which adapts Alberto Moravia's 1954 novel Il Disprezzzo called "The Ghost at Noon" but retitled "Contempt" in 1999 translation.