The Penelopiad . . . or The Hanged Maids' Tale. This is Canadian writer Margaret Attwood's take on the Odyssey, offered in a collaborative production with Canada's National Arts Centre and with several Canadian actresses. Actresses. For this is an unwaveringly feminist all-girl version. A black stage pierced by a shaft of light reveals a shrouded figure . . . Penny Downie, in a claret silk gown (pictured). She is shortly joined by 12 shrouded shapes . . . her devoted maids. The play is, in essence, Penelope's episodic narrative with choral interludes of music, movement, and dialogue.

Attwood, she tells us, was upset reading Homer as a teenager by the revenge exacted by the returning Odysseus not only on the parasitic suitors assailing his wife but on the maids who had yielded to them and thus been accomplices in the despoilment of his house. So foul are they, Homer tells us, that the slow, painful, plebeian death of hanging is inflicted.

Attwood's Penelope, speaking from Hades, tells her story: a resourceful girl, married off like "a package of meat", a clever estate manager but powerless to do more than wait and trick her way through 20 years; to her the maids are confidants and helpers. She returns, without complaint, to her husband's bed. In Hades, their ghosts haunt her. This scenario, obviously, places a great burden on the actress, and Downie carries it with verve. The maids' given cameo character roles are uniformly admirable. Kate Hennig's old nurse Eurycleia, Kelly McIntosh in gorgeous gold as Helen, Sarah Malin's smiling irresistibly charming Odysseus (authoritative enough to achieve that final cleansing), and Mojisola Adebayo as his son Telemachus, adolescent but soon to be master in his turn all make a mark. I am less happy about the choral work. Josette Bushell-Mingo and Veronica Tennant keep the movement going and use all the theatre space well. Fact is, women's voices can be shrill. A dozen at a time can be very shrill. Asked to shout and stamp and (sort of) sing are too shrill. This is a very shouty affair, best seen in the jolly seafaring episode.

After August 18, the Swan closes - not, fortunately to undergo major surgery, but (one gathers) to avoid din and dust when the builders move in next door at the main stage.