Penelope continues at Belly Button at Underbelly, Cowgate until 30 August 2026. The production also plays the Underbelly Boulevard Soho, London on 4 September 2026.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
This gorgeous chamber musical is an electrifying tour de force.
In an outstandingly expressive performance, dramatic soprano Grace McLean brings a huge emotional range to her portrayal of Penelope, the abandoned wife of Odysseus.
Alex Bechtel’s music and lyrics, accompanied by the book he has co-written with McLean and director Eva Steinmetz, present Penelope’s 20 years of waiting in a through-composed score. This enables McLean’s melodramatic histrionics to project intensely personal suppressed grief, helpless frustration, ecstatic hope and desperate hallucination.
The music amplifies and resonates Penelope’s mental states and is completely captivating. Suspended dissonance underpins the tragedy of her situation containing rather than provoking anger. At the same time the three-piece band of Bechtel on keyboard with Anna MacLean on cello and Jonnie Grant on percussion roll the passage of time melodiously and rhythmically along.
McLean’s powerful performative intervention into this soundscape causes explosive overspill into states of mind which open a subconscious underworld where ‘what if?’ doesn’t fit with the calm ordered world of everyday captivity she is forced into. She is running a city, after all, and has a child to bring up.
In this feminist reenactment of Penelope’s struggle, McLean presents the protagonist as a patient weaver, but also as a drunken diva whose identity and sexuality are compromised by her husband’s absence for 20 long years. These depictions are powerfully theatricalised through physical performance, contributing to an iconic portrayal of Penelope that reflects her strength of character.
The band members are also both bystanders and collaborators. When they function as a chorus, they echo the ‘oo oo’ that dominates the opening tidal waves, bringing back the motif Penelope has sung out over the sea to Odysseus.
Penelope’s music structures motivic elements into metrical patterns. There is true beauty in the repetitious dimensions of the score, particularly in its suspenseful minimalism which propels both the momentum of perpetual journeying and the revolving trauma of Penelope’s endless abeyance.
McLean’s vocals resound in this musical far beyond the singing of songs. Her artistry is powerfully visceral as she punctuates the ending of songs using extended vocal techniques to howl, keen and exult, making bodily sounds animalistic in grief.
The text also marks shifts in mood powerfully, such as in Penelope’s declamations that she ‘will clean the whole house’ and may set sail ‘in search of nothing’.
As Penelope buoys herself up to try to imagine a different future, lighter music lifts the derangement of her grief, at least to a bluesy level: ‘I miss us, I do, I do, I do, Odysseus.’ Further musical variety comes with the visioning of Pallas Athene. The voice of the goddess echoes through the band’s questioning pedal notes, and in a lighter touch the chorus sings out her ‘have faith, take heart’, accompanied by tambourine.
Once Odysseus is sighted, clad as a beggar, there is a shift to tonal melodies with hints of late romanticism. This is one of several moments when the involvement of a cello really strikes the heart and embodies Penelope.
The fate of Penelope and her relationship with Odysseus has strong contemporary appeal in the wake of the recent release of the new action fantasy film The Odyssey. But this musical produced by Rigor + Ruckus is unique from other versions. This is due to its emphasis on showing how the relationship between these mythic figures is constructed from Penelope’s memories, hopes and desires and laced with poignant memorialisation of their lost relationship.
Words do not do justice to how it feels to be in the room with this beautiful new work.
Charlotte Purkis
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