Pénélope ô Pénélope

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.