Four grotesquely inept cocktail-quaffing men are trapped in an empty swimming pool on a Greek Island. They tempt fate trying to escape a grisly end in Penelope, Enda Walsh’s latest work to be premiered by Druid. This is Walsh’s stab at sitcom, but in its uncompromising ambition, breadth and brushes with a darkly delightful lunacy, it is also his most daring drama.
What actually unfolds is a tragicomedy awash with ironies, classical allusions and flooded with a devoted reverence for theatre and theatrical device: Penelope overflows with generous offerings to groundlings and gods alike and it is archetypal ‘Walsh’. Elements floating in all his writing have coalesced neatly and comfortably here with the most security and confidence to date. They surface through the blood, expletives, metatheatre, farce, vast themes, and through the desperate yearning of all five doomed characters.
As Tom Stoppard did with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet, Walsh’s narrative runs contemporaneously with events in a well-known text, in this case Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus leaves his wife Penelope to fight in the Trojan wars. He is missing for twenty years and she, in the meantime, is besieged by suitors who try unsuccessfully to woo her. Walsh’s play takes place in the last ninety minutes before Odysseus’s return to his faithful wife, when four remaining suitors decide that their only hope of escape from his colossal vengeance is a final collaborative attempt to persuade Penelope of an alternative future without her husband. Here, Walsh presents a subversive point of view of an epic, where the ‘back-story’ is exposed and the realities of human inadequacy rather than heroism dominate. It’s a modern tragedy, for it is stocked with the confused exploits of the common man rather than the grand machinations of legendary nobles.
Penelope is certainly a cheeky nod at the original: the beautifully beguiling Penelope (Olga Wehrly) gazes longingly from her villa across the Ionian Sea, but regularly enflames her suitors’ hopes by placing them one-by-one in a ‘diary room’ à la ‘Big Brother’ where, in front of a camera, they must put on a show in order to seduce her. As in Endemol’s dying TV show, the suitors are watched by her on her plasma screen as they preen, deceive and compete with each other to avoid eviction and win the ‘prize’. Whilst this reference to contemporary culture might seem a slightly clumsy element (and the device is an enormously important one), the play pulls few punches. Walsh juggles with tragic inevitability, suicide, trust, hope, hate and love but never becomes maudlin or too self-indulgent or even obscure: the hefty stuff is balanced with farce, deprecating put-downs, wit and his trademark eloquently brutal language.
The tale is told through four ex-business types who have degenerated over the decades into an aging drug addict (Niall Buggy), a poseur (Karl Shiels), a ham-actor (Denis Conway) and an anaemic, alcoholic menial (Tadhg Murphy) all of whom end up in Speedo swimming trunks acting out a quick-change cabaret routine parodying love stories from modern history and literature. It is in Walsh’s determination to dive headlong into the grittier bits of life, in his juxtaposition of comedy and agony, and in allowing a voraciously uninhibited imagination full rein that he is most courageous and where the partnership between himself and Druid can demonstrate its distinctive strengths.
As can be expected from this prolifically successful theatre company, Penelope is neatly and crisply delivered by director Mikel Murfi and Druid. In fact, from the viciously sharp dialogue to the slapstick ‘Mousetrap’ play at the end, the work seems written for Murfi, honed by the taut physical and verbal choreography of his previous outing as director for the Walworth Farce. There is a fanatical attention to detail here in the acting (the timing of the word "tonic" with delivery of a slug of Schweppes, Conway’s soliloquy meshing with music from ‘Peer Gynt’), in designer Sabine Dargent’s ominously grotty shell of a swimming pool, and in Paul Keogan’s subtly shifting lighting; Murfi has enabled intimate, lyrical and fluent ensemble work from this all-star cast and crew.
Walsh, Murfi and Druid seem to relish risk-taking and they succeed in bringing a voyeuristic audience safely with them at the same time. Theirs is a rather beautiful ménage.
Matthew Harrison is an English Teacher in Coláiste Iognáid, Galway. He is also theatre critic with the Galway Independent and a contributor to arts programmes on RTÉ Radio.