Spanish premiere Language: French (with Spanish subtitles) Country:France Approx duration: 2hr 15mins (no interval)
The close proximity of the actors to the public, the force of the words, the beauty of the staging, the quality of the performance, make this work a great production...
- Marie-Céline Nivière, Pariscope
"I wanted to write a work about my mother. The story of a woman who waits for the return of her man... I wanted to bring to life a queen of the theatre, an everyday queen, a queen of today," says Simon Abkarian, writer and director of Pénélope ô Pénélope, a piece in which the suffering of a woman is converted into an epic. Abkarian, a regular collaborator with the Théâtre du Soleil and an actor with a long career in both theatre (in productions such as Je suis un phénomène, directed by Peter Brook and The Merchant of Venice, directed by Cécile Garcia-Fogel) and cinema (including Atom Egoyan's Ararat, The Truth about Charlie, directed by Jonathan Demme; Casino Royal, directed by Martin Campbell and Persépolis, under the co-direction of Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud) brings us a show in which legendary heroes like Ulysses and anonymous victims of contemporary wars merge together into one single myth. Pénélope ô Pénélope premiered in Paris in May 2008 and won the French Drama Critic Syndicate prize for the best production in the French language.