Irish Penelopes: rewritings of the myth in "The Midlands trilogy and Penelope"

Abstract

This article looks at how the myth of Penelope relates to Marina Carr’s Midlands Trilogy and Enda Walsh’s Penelope. The analysis of the articulation of Marina Carr’s Penelopes serves to approach the questions of the influence of waiting in these women’s lives as well as the different types of the resulting immobilization which affect their agency. Secondly, the spatial representation of waiting in her theatre is analyzed to identify the contexts where these processes occur. On the other hand, Enda Walsh’s Penelope constitutes a more savage version and his play has been read as “a madcap rewrite of Homer” (Pilný 2013: 219), where the myth is used to interrogate the question of the halt of Ireland as a consequence of the post-Celtic Tiger crisis. Both writers emerged in the 1990’s and were part of “a gifted generation of playwrights in contemporary Ireland” (Randolph 2012: 47).

Keywords

• irish contemporary theatre
• marina carr
• enda walsh
• penelope
• waiting
• myth