‘The Alternative Queen’s Speech’
The Development of a Scene. Oxford, June 2022
Support: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) Knowledge Exchange Innovation Fund; the Association for the Performance of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD); St Hilda's College, Oxford
Participants: Cheney School, a team of MA students including Lucy Ruddiman (actor), Samantha Oxborough and Karima El Demerdasch (mezzo-sopranos), Cassandra Smith (professional weaver)
I’m not a Siren…
The next stage of Penelope’s Web involved its development through a three-day residency held at the University of Oxford, where Cheryl Frances-Hoad was a Visiting Research Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton College. The residency explored the pressures exerted by the patriarchy on all the women of Penelope’s household, and the tensions between Penelope and the twelve enslaved women, in whose execution Penelope may be implicated.
The workshop – its discussions, rehearsals, and final performance – was notable for the way in which it expanded Penelope’s single voice into a multiplicity of voices. Firstly, the character herself was split into two singers, whose mirroring of and divergence from each other drew out the conflicts within Penelope’s own character. Another Penelope, this time an actor (Lucy Ruddiman), paced up and down in her frustration as she delivered some of the words that Atwood had given her. Penelope as the famously cunning weaver of tales and of fictions was reflected in the appearance of a professional weaver, Cassandra Smith, who wove her tapestry live on stage. While she worked there were no voices or stories to be heard at all, but only a winding piano accompaniment composed and performed by Frances-Hoad.
Finally, the enslaved maids themselves appeared through the voices of the students from Cheney School, reciting in unison the final envoi of Atwood’s novella:
we had no voice
we had no name
we had no choice
we had one face
one face the same
we took the blame
it was not fair but now we’re here
we’re all here too
the same as you…
Discussions at this workshop drew out how far Penelope’s character in Atwood’s novella is shaped by her accounts of childhood trauma and rejection, and by her conflicted relationship with Helen and with her enslaved maids – whose own trauma appears to be only partly grasped by the queen herself. Does Penelope hear the girls’ songs at all? As Macintosh noted, she seems to be tone-deaf, this daughter of a water-dwelling naiad who hears only as if she is living under water. And what kind of music does one give to a watery character who repeatedly insists that she is not a seductive singer from the deep: ‘I’m not a Siren’? Yet the creative artists in particular were building sympathy for Penelope, for her situation, and her powerlessness.
A fresh challenge arose in these first attempts to voice the choral group of enslaved girls. The tonal shift of the demotic, folksy rhymes in Atwood’s novella seemed initially to operate in tension with the traditionally elite-coded sounds of classical opera. What kind of music and movement are they engaged in as they tell their dreadful story? Moreover, how should we interpret the unison voice of the twelve girls? Is their unity a powerful grouping that makes them more than the sum of their parts, or is it a reminder of an unindividuated dehumanisation?
Within three days the aria had blossomed into a drama that had engaged students, researchers, singers and creative artists. Frances-Hoad and Pansard-Besson both reflected on how unusual and fresh the development of the project was proving to be. Frances-Hoad would normally be adding music to a text after she has received a completed text; Pansard-Besson would normally prepare and direct an opera after she has received a full score. In this project everyone so far has been involved in the research and the rehearsal at every stage.