A good way to treat a classic is to take a new perspective on the subject: thus Stoppard gave us the view from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and their quest for purpose whilst Caroline Horton (writer and performer) has given us a frangibly patient and barely consummated, Penelope, awaiting the return of her militaristic hubby, Odysseus (Ulysses if you like your myths in Latin). She asks, ‘What would the myth look like today?’

Her opening tack is via the grim jollity of the middle classes determined not to be overwhelmed by hardship. Penelope, in the guise of a blogger for a kind of Mumsnet for military wives exhorts her (online) audience to, “Be the wife he can be proud of”. But this is a wife on her emotional uppers, dressed, Miss Havisham-like in her wedding white and putting on a brave face. The play becomes a threnody for lost youth, lost companionship and a life trapped by circumstance.

Horton’s method is to alternate straight storytelling and acting in the moment as she moves gracefully between the peart, newlywed, fifteen year old and the angry single mum with a grown up (and by now bearded) son. All, by the way, acted out on her bed, a kind of emotional raft adrift on the sea which laps around in both sound and on a video loop which plays on a bedside screen.

The approach cuts to a potential hidden reality behind the myth and in a way much loved by feminists, reclaims a path which history has ignored as a result of taking, arguably, a wrong turning. The effect is both comic and haunting.

The mythic character Penelope has come down to us as a byword for chastity and faithfulness in marriage having managed to put off by various stratagems the hundred odd suitors who pitched up on Ithaca, Odysseus having told her to remarry if he had not returned by the time Telemachus had grown a beard. The show briefly became a two hander as a member of the audience (cough) was lured onto the stage and cross-examined as to his suitability as hubby number two. Happily, avoiding the fate meted out by Odysseus to the other suitors on his return, the suitor escapes leaving Penelope to ponder what might have been.

Although the stage is effectively only the size of the bed, director, Lucy J Skilbeck, has found plenty of movement and ground to lead her audience on a rich odyssey. The result is everything you could want from a one woman, one act play, which entertains as much as it provokes thought. By any measure that is a result to be proud of. ★★★★☆ Graham Wyles 10/04/15