Stage Struck

PETER CRAWLEYon why silence ins't always golden

TO ANYBODY who has been waiting for Penelope to break her millennia-old silence, Enda Walsh’s recent play must count as a disappointment.

After all, the wife of Odysseus, who is left at home for 20 years while scrupulously and craftily avoiding the lusty advances of more than 100 suitors, is too often represented as “the perfect wife, the model woman, a paragon of patience”. Surely, Penelope must have something to say for herself? In the 90 minutes of the play that bears her name, however, not a word passes Penelope’s lips.

If this seems surprising, the playwright sounds equally stumped. "I kept thinking, this woman is going to get involved," he recently told the Galway Advertiser,"but the more it went on the more I thought, I can't actually have her talk, it would just completely lessen her by having her talk."

This sentiment is unlikely to meet with silent nods of approval from specialists in feminist theatre. For centuries, otherwise wordy dramas have featured hushed female figures whose muteness is rarely taken as a badge of empowerment.

Women have long been hidden from history, depicted onstage by male actors and denied either an authentic voice or any voice at all in dramatic fiction. Contemporary scholars tend to stay alive to the politics of silence.

Even Brian Friel, in his materly Translations, perpetuated the cliché of the uncomplicated figure lost for words. Ironically, it's a play about language, yet it leaves one character (the young Sarah) literally speechless. She may be instrumental to the plot and her inability to define herself is metaphorically potent, but any actor who has longed to speak the lines of Friel must be aggrieved to read the script and leave their highlighter pen firmly capped.

To be without language on the stage is often to be without a convincing psychology or consciousness. In Penelope, a play that is essentially a discourse on love and destruction between four men, words speak louder than actions.

Walsh, it should be remembered, had previously never featured a female character without affording her some startling verbiage: Runt in Disco Pigs, Daughter in Bedboundand the three sisters in The New Electric Ballroomare consoled and tormented by a torrent of language, and it would be hard to find more challenging parts in Irish drama.

With such expectations, as well as the desire to bring new dimensions to a character that can resemble a facile fantasy, the longer Penelope doesn’t speak, the weightier her silence becomes – and the harder it is to dispel.

Perhaps Walsh’s Penelope has decided that to be inscrutable is to be invincible. Or maybe James Joyce’s version of Penelope, the stream-of-consciousness- delivering Molly Bloom, has already said it all. Or perhaps she is really a device in a play concerned with something else entirely. Whatever the reason, for the moment Penelope is keeping schtum.