Grace McLean on playing Penelope: ‘I’ve really come to understand what it means to endure’
Main man Odysseus rather steals focus in The Odyssey. Now, a bit of Broadway star power and an award-winning score is giving his very patient wife Penelope a voice. Leading lady Grace McLean chats to Afreka Thomson about getting under the heroine’s skin and going up against a certain Hollywood take on the classic Greek myth
While Odysseus, the wandering hero of Homer’s Odyssey, faces monsters, battles and glory, his long-suffering wife Penelope has to sit around and wait for a couple of decades. If you’ve been to the cinema lately, you’re probably well aware of this. But Broadway star Grace McLean is bringing a concert-theatre musical to the Fringe where Homer’s overlooked heroine finally gets her say. McLean stars in Penelope and admits she was instantly drawn to the project. ‘I’d seen their work and I loved it,’ she says of composer Alex Bechtel and director Eva Steinmetz. ‘I thought, “how do I get to work with these people?”’. Bechtel began writing the songs while quarantining from his partner during the pandemic, only to realise the voice emerging wasn’t his own but Penelope’s. The lockdown concept album gradually evolved into a full musical, and when McLean was invited to join, she didn’t hesitate. ‘It wasn’t even a musical yet,’ she laughs. ‘Eva heard the songs and said, “I think this is a show”.’
McLean expected to come in as a performer. Instead, she found herself helping answer a central question: what does Penelope have to say? ‘To be trusted by these people I respected so much, to really get in the sandbox and figure out what this woman has to say, was just really fun,’ she reflects. ‘That’s why you want to get in on the ground floor.’ Five years in Penelope’s shoes has left McLean convinced she’s far more than the faithful wife history remembers. One of her favourite moments comes in ‘Pilgrim Song’ where Penelope imagines what life might look like if she simply walked away. ‘It’s Penelope imagining herself as a traveller. Like, “what if I left here? And what if I became a wandering soul?” She gets to leave her identity as Penelope and Queen Of Ithaca behind. What might that look like for her?’ Penelope isn’t simply waiting: she’s imagining another life. ‘Her whole act of choosing to wait is a creative act.’
Spending so long with the character has shaped McLean, too. ‘It’s so interesting to have gotten to sit with her for so long,’ she says. ‘I’ve been through some hard life things and to have this archetype of this woman floating around… I’ve really come to understand what it means to endure.’ After years of workshops and development, she’s finally bringing Penelope to the Fringe, a festival she’s wanted to return to since first visiting 16 years ago. ‘The spirit of the Festival is so seductive,’ she says. ‘There’s a scrappiness and an excitement and a “we’ve got to just try this” energy.’
That intimacy is exactly why McLean is bringing the production to Edinburgh. ‘It’s not a fourth-wall kind of show. It’s different with every audience.’ One person has made seeing Penelope something of a mission: a devoted stan has attended virtually every production in the US, sitting in the front row, mouthing every lyric and enthusiastically headbanging along. Recounting the story over Zoom, McLean can’t resist acting it out. ‘Their enthusiasm is amazing,’ she laughs. ‘We need people like them at every show!’
Edinburgh audiences may well oblige. McLean’s Fringe run also happens to coincide with Christopher Nolan’s hotly anticipated adaptation of The Odyssey. She jokes that the Oscar-winning director is ‘really riding our wave. The difference,’ she grins, ‘is one is big, epic: fight, fight, fight, man, man, man. Ours is just the audience and me, singing about my feelings.’
Penelope, Underbelly Cowgate, 5–30 August, 3.45pm.