Tag: Sara Perks

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Full cast and creative team announced for The Penelopiad at York Theatre Royal

The cast for York Theatre Royals’ revival of The Penelopiad

AMID the summer buzz over Christopher Nolan’s film account of The Odyssey, the full cast and creative team is in place for York Theatre Royal’s autumn revival of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad.

Joining the already announced Amelia Bullmore in the leading role of Penelope will be Nell Baker (Laertes), Danielle Bird (Eurycleia), Olivia Burton-Laws (Naiad Mother), Theatre Royal pantomime alumna Faye Campbell (Melantho), Pena Iiyambo (Helen), Kat Johns-Burke (Antonius), Syakira  Moeladi (Telemachus) and Charlie Russell (Odysseus).

Directed by Theatre Royal creative director Juliet Forster, the production will open on October 14, with previews from October 10, and will run until October 31.

“Margaret Atwood is such a phenomenal writer – she’s clever, witty, subversive and her insights into human dynamics are acutely well observed,” says Juliet. “The Penelopiad is a funny, moving, fast-paced, visual feast, a classical tale told through a contemporary lens. The epic, heroic story of The Odyssey will never look the same again! I am thrilled we will be staging it here at York Theatre Royal, and I can’t wait to get started on the show.” 

The Penelopiad writer Margaret Atwood. Picture: Luis Mora, 2020

Adapted for the stage by Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood from her 2005 novella, The Penelopiad’s feminist retelling of The Odyssey reimagines Homer’s epic through the eyes of Penelope and her chorus of maids.  

Atwood, author of the modern feminist classic The Handmaid’s Tale, presents a powerful, irreverent and darkly humorous retelling that unpicks one of the oldest of myths.  Immortalised as the devoted and faithful wife to the glorious Odysseus, Penelope waits 20 years for her husband to return from the Trojan War, silently weaving and unpicking and weaving again. Now it is time to hear the story of those left behind. 

Reimagining this ancient tale, Atwood gives voice to the silenced Penelope and her maids. Wandering the underworld, Penelope spins a different kind of thread: her side of the story – a tale of injustice, betrayal and revenge. 

 Forster, director of such York Theatre Royal productions as Little Women and Around The World In 80 Days-ish!, will deliver an exuberant and witty retelling that questions the version of events we think we know and exposes the truth behind the myth.

Juliet Forster: Director of York Theatre Royal’s production of The Penelopiad

Juliet says: “It has been such a joy to meet so many brilliant women over the last couple of months, and what a phenomenally talented cast and creative team we have lined up for The Penelopiad. It is clear just how strongly this story resonates with people today, and I am looking forward to a rehearsal room buzzing with excitement and creativity. 

“Margaret Atwood’s powerful script is so rich with wit and humour as she unveils a new feminist perspective on the familiar Odyssey myth. The show is interwoven with songs and exuberant movement and we hope to offer audiences an entirely different way of understanding the story of Penelope and her maids – and most importantly a great night out.”   

Amelia Bullmore will return to the stage to star as Penelope, having last trod the boards in the 2018 revival of Annie Baker’s 2009 play Circle Mirror Transformation at HOME, Manchester.

Amelia says:“I’m thrilled I’m going to be working at York Theatre Royal – such a beautiful theatre – on this fantastic play. The Penelopiad manages to be funny, dark, moving and provocative by turns. And it’s Margaret Atwood, so the writing is uniquely brilliant. I think audiences will love how playful it is and how directly it connects with them.”

Amelia Bullmore: Cast as Penelope in The Penelopiad

Welcoming her to York, Juliet says: “It is wonderful to have Amelia on board to lead the cast for The Penelopiad. Penelope is such a fascinating and complex character in Margaret Atwood’s retelling and I know Amelia will do her justice! I can’t wait to work with her to bring this compelling story to the stage for York audiences.”

Joining Forster in the all-female creative team will be designer Sara Perks, lighting designer Alexandra Stafford, composer, musical director and sound designer Kate Marlais, movement director Michelle Edwards and casting director Ellie Collyer-Bristow.

To ensure as many people as possible can enjoy the show, the first preview on October 10 will be offered on a ‘Pay What You Choose’ basis, allowing audiences to pay as little or as much as they wish. 

The York Theatre Royal Choir will present special foyer performances for audiences on October 10 and press night, October 14, before the 7.30pm shows start.  

Tickets are on sale on 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

York Theatre Royal’s poster for The Penelopiad. Concept: Émilie Chen. Photography: Camilla Greenwell

Did you know?


MARGARET Atwood’s The Penelopiad premiered at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon, in July 2007 in a co-production between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Canada’s National Arts Centre. York Theatre Royal’s production marks the first major UK revival since that original staging. 

Amelia Bullmore: back story

THEATRE credits include Circle Mirror Transformation (HOME Manchester); A Christmas Carol (Noël Coward Theatre); The Norman Conquests (The Old Vic and Circle in the Square Theatre, New York); The Crucible (Sheffield Crucible); Really Old, Like Forty Five (National Theatre); Road and The Queen And I (Leicester Haymarket, Royal Court Theatre and UK tour).

Also, The Thickness Of Skin (Royal Court Theatre); A View From The Bridge, Romeo And Juliet (Royal Exchange Theatre and UK Tour); All My Sons and How The Other Half Loves (Cheltenham Everyman); Be-Bop-A-Lula (Liverpool Playhouse and UK tour); The Red Balloon (Contact Theatre); The Threepenny Opera (Birmingham Rep);  Major Barbara and Sweet Bird Of Youth (Citizens Theatre, Glasgow);The Way Of The World (Wilton’s Musical Hall) and Ladies In The Lift (Red Stockings Theatre Company.)

Her television credits include Riot Women; The Buccaneers; Happy Valley; Gentleman Jack; Scott & Bailey (as series regular DCI Gill Murray and co-writer); Twenty Twelve; The Crown; Vienna Blood; I’m Alan Partridge; Jam; Big Train; State Of Play; Ashes To Ashes; The Jetty; Marble Hall Murders;The Larkins and Coronation Street (as series regular Steph Barnes).

Her films include Mrs Dalloway, Festival, The Truth, Endgame and What We Did On Our Holiday.

She is an acclaimed writer for TV, radio and stage. Her play Di And Viv And Rose premiered at Hampstead Theatre, London before transferring to the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End.

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REVIEW: Around The World In 80 Days, Tilted Wig/York Theatre Royal, at York Theatre Royal, today, 2.30pm, 7.30pm ****

Ride on time: Alex Phelps’s Phileas Fogg in Around The World In 80 Days. Picture: Anthony Robling

THE circus will leave town after a three-day home run concludes with today’s two performances, ahead of a nationwide tour until July 22 in Tilted Wig’s collaboration with York Theatre Royal.

Creative director Juliet Forster’s adaptation of Jules Verne’s 1873 novel was first staged on the school playing fields of York in the socially distanced summer of 2021, big-topped off by a finale back indoors at the Theatre Royal.

After rehearsals on Sara Perks’s fabulous travelling set in the Studio, the striped flags and organ music of Vernes Circus have taken up temporary residence in the main house with a multi-disciplined cast of five tasked with playing circus performers in turn playing a minimum of two of Verne’s characters each.

In prickly English Victorian gent Phileas Fogg’s wager with his stuffy Reform Club cronies that he can traverse the globe in 80 days, Forster wastes no time in pricking the balloon that Fogg travelled in such a form of transportation. In screen versions, yes; in the Frenchman’s novel, no. Besides, budget constraints rule it out, decrees Alex Phelps’s punctilious Ringmaster.

The imagination, however, needs no budget, and so, just as in Patrick Barlow’s parody re-creation of John Buchan’s novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s film of The 39 Steps, Forster’s cast must apply physical theatre panache, dextrous elasticity, props and even costume to convey anything from an elephant to a train and a trading vessel in often unexpected ways.

Calling on the stone-faced grace of Buster Keaton, Phelps’s immaculate, unflustered, tea-drinking, not-always-scrupulous Fogg/immaculate/flustered Ringmaster seeks to control proceedings with the help/hindrance of Wilson Benedito’s Clown/servant Passepartout.

Weaving their way into the fast-moving, helter-skelter story are Genevieve Sabherwal’s Trick Rider/Indian princess Aouda, Katriona Brown’s whip-cracking Acrobat/Nellie Bly and returning 2021 cast member Eddie Mann’s Knife Thrower/spiv Detective Fox. From assorted accents to assorted circus skills, they reveal a restless, constantly changing repertoire of theatrical alacrity with relish.

As the revolving signage announces each new destination, so everything could be in too much of a rush. Except that Forster runs the parallel story of ground-breaking American journalist Nellie Bly’s real-life race around the world, related by Brown’s Bly in elegant travelogue prose that benefits the production with its change of pace, all the while amusingly winding up Phelps’s Fogg.

Favourite scenes? The slow-motion bridge collapse denoted by ladders and the heavy-drinking tussle between Mann’s Fix and Benedito’s Passepartout on a see-saw, where everything is in the balance.

As you would want, Forster’s second act surpasses the first, the company’s teamwork becoming ever funnier, their flamboyant, fun circus acrobatics stacking up, with high praise for Asha Jennings-Grant’s movement direction and Edwin Gray’s sound design too. Perks’s designs and costumes delight throughout.

Just as York Theatre Royal’s The Railway Children took off for London and Toronto success, Tilted Wig must be thanked for giving new air to Forster’s Around The World In 80 Days, now travelling around the country for 171 days. Fans of Mischief’s mischief-making, calamitous comedies will love it.

York box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk. The tour visits Cast, Doncaster, from July 5 to 8; castdoncaster.com. Age guidance: five plus.

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REVIEW: Charles Hutchinson’s verdict on Footloose The Musical, York Theatre Royal ****

Hot pants! Jake Quickenden’s hunky cowboy Willard Hewitt strikes a pose in Footloose The Musical

THERE was a time when Racky Plews’s touring production of Footloose The Muscal would have played the Grand Opera House, not York Theatre Royal, as indeed it did in May 2017 with Bradford’s Gareth Gates’s cowboy Willard as the star attraction.

Just as the Mischief’s brand of comic mayhem with a team of accident-prone Charlie Chaplins has moved from Cumberland Street (The Play That Goes Wrong, September 2021) to St Leonard’s Place (Magic Goes Wrong, April 26 to May 1), Footloose’s transfer is a sign of chief executive Tom Bird balancing the Theatre Royal’s obligations as a producing house with the need for commercial prudence after the triplet of Covid lockdowns.

Sure enough, Plews’s new production – “reworked with a new set, new costumes, the lot,” as Darren Day, one of two new star names, put it – was playing to a full stalls and dress circle at Wednesday’s performance. Box-office business has been brisk, driven by the industry’s time-honoured key ticket purchaser: women, especially for musical theatre.

Bereft: Darren Day’s burdened Reverend Shaw Moore

Men, outnumbered as ever on Wednesday, nevertheless would have a fun time at this feelgood, then feelevenbetter show, delivered by Plews’s cast of actor-musicians with the pizzazz befitting Holding Out For A Hero, Let’s Hear It For The Boy and the title number.

Faithful to the 1984 teen movie, Footloose is the teen-rebel story of Ren McCormack (Joshua Hawkins), the high-school newcomer who has blown into Bible Belt Bomont from Chicago with mum Ethel (Geri Allen) after his father deserted them without explanation.

An innocent abroad, Ren is out of step with a stymied town that buckles the Bible belt on the tightest notch, the town council having banned dancing in the wake of four Bomont High pupils perishing in a drink-and-drug fuelled car accident.

Lucy Munden’s Ariel, right, with Oonagh Cox’s Rusty, Samantha Richards’s Urleen and Jess Barker’s Wendy-Jo

In contrast with that tragedy’s fun-negating shadow, Dean Pitchford, Walter Bobbie and Tom Snow’s musical does indeed cut loose, demanding an exuberant, high-energy performance from start to finish.

Footloose is light, insubstantial, even a little daft, being a dance-filled musical about not being allowed to dance, but let’s not split hairs. Last time it felt dated too, but deliberately and knowingly Eighties in style, and that look is still there in Sara Perks’s designs and costumes, but so are tattoos galore and ripped jeans, along with a state-of the-art lighting design by Chris Davey.

What’s more, there is just enough of a sting in the tale of stultifying life in the WASP smalltown of Bomont, where the music died five years ago in this quiet Deep American South backwater.

Giant leap: Joshua Hawkins’s Ren McCormack swaps Chicago for backwoods Bomont

Sunday’s earnest sermons by the anguished Reverend Shaw Moore (Darren Day) set the tone, having administered the dance ban after losing his son. Day, hair newly grey and goatee bearded, grey suit as buttoned up as Moore’s emotions, is the old hand among predominantly young players, and he brings gravitas to the heavyweight role.

He has one of the hit-filled show’s non-hits to navigate in Heaven Help Me, but does so, not once, but twice, with beautifully controlled singing, where less is Moore. Look out for his Elvis impersonation in Reverend Moore’s transitional moment: a lovely light touch.   

Moore’s counterpoint is Hawkins’s appealing Ren, the clean-living, accidental rebel who breaks every Bomont taboo, complicating matters further by falling for Ariel (Lucy Munden), the preacher man’s equally rebellious poetess daughter, setting him on a collision course with college bad-lad Chuck (Tom Mussell).

Cutting loose: Joshua Hawkins’ Ren and Lucy Munden’s Ariel

Those of a certain age were excited that Day – who was called theatre royalty on television the other day – would be in the cast. Gen Z were far more excited at the presence of 2018 Dancing On Ice winner Jake Quickenden in the comedy role of hunky cowboy Willard Hewitt, the lovably hapless town hick.

Boy, he delivers, being delightfully dim in failing to read the endless advances of Oonagh Cox’s spunky Rusty and revelling in stripping off to his toned, tattooed torso in Holding Out For A Hero (recalling his time in The Dreamboys revue).

As for his singing, Quickenden nails the comedy number, Mama Says (You Can’t Back Down), one of the high points of Matt Cole’s exuberant choreography.

Jack Quickenden’s cowboy Willard strips down in Footloose The Musical

Hawkins’s Ren, Munden’s Ariel, Mussell’s Chuck, Cox’s Rusty, Samantha Richards’s Urleen, Jess Barker’s Wendy-Jo and the multi role-playing Geri Allen bring plenty to the party (or non-party, as the Reverend would prefer it).

Indeed, let’s hear it for all the boys and girls, as they sing, dance, play instruments and skilfully walk the tightrope between the serious and the tongue in cheek in their performances. Let’s hear it for the drummer too, Bob Carr, ever-present up top at the back, making everything stick and click.

Footloose and fancy free this weekend? This show is just the ticket for you.

Footloose, York Theatre Royal, 7.30pm tonight; 2.30pm, 7.30pm, tomorrow. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.