Penelope

A hi-fi on an upturned snooker table. A dishcloth dried stiff on a makeshift line. A tiger-skin throw. A gratuitously large barbecue. Everything about this set screams bachelor pad. Except, that is, for the ladders and the tiled walls, which whisper, eerily, ‘swimming pool’.

Playwright Enda Walsh takes an inspired dive into the mythic and overtly metaphoric for his third collaboration with Galway’s Druid Theatre, a piece loosely based on Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ but pleasing to fans of Flann O’Brien’s philosophical surrealism and ‘Sexy Beast’.

In an Irish Ithaca, four men have spent ten years competing for the love of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, from the bottom of a drained swimming pool. The waterless pool, stained with the blood of lost rivals, is like a heart without hope – because this woman, who glides mutely by in a caress of wave noise and aquamarine, is palpably unwinnable. But last night, the suitors dreamed that a vengeful Odysseus finally returned home. And so they agree to court collaboratively.

Few things are funnier than the sight of men being serious in Speedos, and the physical comedy peaks in a high-speed mime show. But Walsh’s characters live and die on language, and regurgitate and revise their poetry like cud. In other Walsh works, people used words to rewrite their pasts. 'Penelope’s men talk to preserve their endless present – whether through hollow rhapsody, flippant ‘yap yap’ or existential SOS. There’s some middle-aged spread. But the whole blazes with mysterious passion and violence as it closes – in an image Johnny Cash would approve – with two rings of fire.