REMEMBER Penelope, the wife of wily Greek hero Odysseus, who waited all those years for him to come home from his post-war travels and amorous adventures?

Her name, which means “weaver” in ancient Greek, is a byword for wifely duty and devotion, because, while raising their son Telemachus she deceived a host of suitors by claiming she would choose a husband as soon as she’d finished weaving a shroud, but by night she secretly unravelled what she had done.

But there’s more to Penelope’s story than met the eye of Homer and now two local theatre companies, Papermoon and Crouching Giraffe, are joining to stage “The Penelopiad” by Margaret Atwood, author of “The Handmaid’s Tale”.

The play, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2007, retells Homer’s “Odyssey” from the perspective of Penelope, through a cast of 13 women who play all parts. It’s never been performed in Canberra and the only other performance in Australia seems to have been at Deakin University in 2014.

I caught up with director Kate Blackhurst, well-known here both as an actor and director with Canberra REP.

To cover myself, I’d quickly raced through the last few chapters of “The Odyssey” and been shocked by the bloodthirsty way Odysseus butchered the suitors on his return, and even more shocked at how he and Telemachus hanged all of Penelope‘s maids because they had dallied with the suitors.

“What was Penelope really up to?” Blackhurst asks rhetorically. Homer exonerates her, since she’s been put to sleep by a drink, or maybe not. And the maids’ liaisons (maybe even rapes) had taken place on their queen’s advice, as she hoped to find out more information from the suitors through them.

The set is abstract because it’s set in Hades and the play begins when Penelope is already dead so everything, Blackhurst says, is seen through the filter of her memory.

Her first line is, “now that I’m dead I know everything”. There are flashbacks to her birth, her childhood, her wedding day and when Odysseus left for the Trojan wars.

“When Atwood was writing this, she asked two main questions – why did they hang the maids and how complicit was Penelope, could she have saved them?” Blackhurst says.

“It’s a very unpleasant ending to a great story and many versions gloss over it, mentioning the killing of the suitors but leaving out the maids.”

Grim as it is, the show’s choreographer, Brooke Thomas, is a belly dancer who has some fun with seductive moves for the maids.

As Atwood portrays Penelope, she’s learnt to be pretty cunning as a single mother, possibly almost as cunning as her husband, the brains behind the Trojan horse. You just have to read between the lines.

Blackhurst’s production company is called “Crouching Giraffe” because, she says, she likes to look at impossibilities – giraffes can’t crouch.

Tony Turner of Papermoon Productions is coming to work on the sections where the women, cast at open auditions and representing women of all ages and body types, act as a kind of Greek chorus and the performance is enhanced by original music composed by Glenn Gore Phillips. Veteran actor Elaine Noone gets the prize part of Penelope.

The costumes by Annie Kay include weaving motifs, including braiding of the hair, and are made of repurposed materials.

Blackhurst thinks “The Penelopiad” puts a different slant, but not necessarily a contemporary one, on a classic – even though the slaughter of the aid can be seen now as victim-blaming, because Penelope had allowed them to be ravished. 

Penelope is seen as the faithful and patient wife at home, being a good hostess while waiting for the husband to come back. Atwood has said, “let’s take that and look at what might’ve happened to her”.

It puts Blackhurst in mind of the movie “Cold Mountain”, where Nicole Kidman plays the woman left at home to manage the family farm while the husband goes off to fight for the Confederates – “many women are left behind but the stories are always about the heroics of the men”.

“The Penelopiad” at The Courtyard Studio, July 7-17, book here or 6275 2700.