Anything to add, Penelope?

0:00College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy to layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on Lululemon.com now.

1:00Standard issue for all women. Hello, Hannah here and welcome to Tuesday's podcast. Lots more to come this week, including rated or dated, in which we talk about Shane Meadows' 2006 film This Is England. Then on Friday, Mickey has a natter with author Liz Heider about the power of stories, grief, connection and how she became a teller of tall tales. But on to today, because who can wait? I certainly can't. In it, I'm talking to second time visitor to Standard issue, the wonderful Amelia Bulmore. She's about to appear in the Penelope ad adapted for the stage by Margaret Atwood from her 2005 book of the same name, which is itself based on the Odyssey. So great timing, right? Amelia plays the role of Penelope in the production, which opens at the York Theatre Royal on Saturday and is on until the 31st of October.

2:02A link for tickets is in the show notes. Amelia and I talk about all sorts of other stuff, like learning to play the guitar for riot women. And how, despite being best known for her work based in the North of England, she's actually a Londoner. Long time listeners of the podcast will know that Jen and I interviewed Amelia before, back in March 2020, just before the entire world changed for everyone. If you're a supporter of Standard issue via our Patreon page, you will hear more of this interview, including us chatting about what has changed in the acting world as a result of that long shutdown. If you'd like to hear that, indeed hear more from all our interviews and get ad-free listening or extra content, which last week included us chatting with the boss herself, Sarah Milliken, follow the link in the show notes to find out more. And if you're a first-hand listener, welcome. Come on in. Bring a friend if you like. Now, I've never started an interview this way before, but I'm going to start it this way and say,

3:02Amelia, I literally just watched someone set your husband on fire. When you have to mention that, that's good. What the... I do wonder every time a new series of slow horses starts, I wonder if I'm ever going to see you in it, because it is one of the television series that I absolutely... I mean, I like it for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons I really like it is that it's got so many juicy roles for women over the age of 50. You're right, women, cast Joana Scadlin, crops up again in it this series. Sometimes I think it's easy for me to look from the outside and say things are getting better for women over 50 and acting. Does it look like that from the inside as well? So it's a very, very hard thing to measure, particularly if you're working. It's very hard to know. You know, it's a very hard to see what you're not doing or what it might be like otherwise. Yeah. So I can't really answer it very well.

4:05Wood for the trees thing. And actually, I saw you quote Sally, you'd ask Sally, Wayne Wright, do you think things are better for women in television? And her answer had been, it's probably better for white women in television. So it all depends, you know, it's all conditional on your specifics really. So yeah, it's a hard one to answer. Any sort of overview of the industry, I always feel sort of shy of it. I just think I don't, I don't really know. You know, often feels very female, often feels very collaborative and healthy and wholesome, like, you know, work is often really, really positive. But I hear all sorts of things. You can be working on a job and you can be having a great time, really enjoying it, you think it to kind of, ethically very sound. Endeavour, the people are good, you like the vibe and then you'll just hear something about

5:05somebody else's experience of it. And it is completely different. I mean, that's just that's life. But it can always really take you back. They were for thinking that you've got any kind of trustworthy impression of a thing. You're just looking through your little window, you know, and if you're looking through a jammy, lucky window, you can really get the wrong impression. So what we're here to talk about is the Penella Pia, which I'm something quite striking to happen this year in as much as I went to see the Odyssey, much like everybody else this summer. And I thought it was very good, but I was having a tiny grumble with some friends of mine about the issue of the murder of the collaborating women. And I was just saying it's, I can see why they've done it because they've tried to sort of sanitize the story a little bit. But given that that actually does happen in real life, and repeatedly almost at the end of every wall,

6:07I felt really annoyed that it had been taken out. And a friend of mine said to me, you should raise Margaret Atwood's Penella Pia, that'll, you get your rage out there. And I did read it via audio book and when I was listening to it via audio book, has it got the great chorus going on in it? Wow. I thought this would make an amazing play. And then literally a few weeks later, I got an email from Cameron saying, would you like to talk to him immediately a bumble? And about the pen of play, I don't know. I thought that is, it's almost like I willed it into existence. That is at Woody and there isn't it very much. How'd you read it before? No, I had not read it. In fact, I was pretty dim about the myths. I'd got a vague idea. It's sort of impossible. It's a bit like the archers. You will know roughly what's going on without even physically paying attention. So I knew roughly about some myths that I hadn't joined it all up. So I read the play. I thought it was amazing, shocking, surprising, funny,

7:09crazy, wildly entertaining. I also thought, how can you put all those things together? How can you have these bedfellows, these really complicated, difficult, contradictory bedfellows? But she's Margaret Atwood, so she can. And then I began to get into the world of the myths as approached by women novelists. It's a huge genre. You've got your pap walkers, Madeline Miller, you've got Natalie Haynes. And once you start joining them up and thinking, that's your cousin. You murdered him. You know, when he starts, he gets it all together. He gets very sort of gossipy, like some crazy extended family, plus monsters, plus gods. So I got really, really hooked. And then I thought, well, I'd better see Christopher Nolan's honesty. I'd better see that because not least of all, I guess most people who come to York Theatre Royal

8:10would have seen it. So you should know what's in their head. You should know what's in their mind's eye. So I thought it was, you know, it's extremely entertaining film. I didn't nod off. I didn't share the tear either, but you know, wildly entertaining. And I loved details. And I loved that the Cyclops eye is that way. Great idea. I loved the Trojan horse being a sort of rearing Lloyd's bank kind of a horse, rather than a trundling giant toy and all of that. And how terrible it would have been waiting in the horse and all of that. But the audience will have pictures in their head of what it might be for a whole to be full of sikters or what a black ship sailing across the wine dark sea might look like and all that stuff. So it's amazing that they've got those many of them will have those pictures in their head. And it is like when you read the Penelope ad now, which Margaret outward wrote in 2005.

9:11And this is also at Woody in her kind of precinct time travel away. It reads like a reply to fill. So yeah, it's a brilliant bit of programming. I mean, York Theatre Royal. That was somebody really short about that. Yeah, agreed because like I say, this will have been in the in the planning. Well, it's it's not things that you think are the timing on that. Do you yet the director says they had approached it before and covid messed everything up, but they were going to do it before. But she said, obviously the themes of what happens to women in war, what are those silenced voices? What's the collateral damage that it's so relevant? For all those ideas and those are timeless truths, but they're particularly present now. So she was thinking about that and then she heard that this film was going to come out. But what nobody could have known is that the film would totally catch fire.

10:11Yeah, and then people would then go and buy the orders. Imagine imagine the sales of the Odyssey going through the roof. What would home a think about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it's really interesting because because I mean, I went to a comprehensive, I always say the classics is being something that's kind of not for me. We've had Natalie Haynes on the podcast quite a few times. And yeah, I think she is doing sterling working, convincing people that it is for them. Yeah. You know it and be for them. College football is back. So Hilton called on me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey. Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it. When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton for this day.

11:15What struck me, because you say that it's funny, what struck me about the about upwards writing is how funny that is. And how the sort of, oh God, he's been bewitched again. He's having to sleep with God as he's treated as a joke. And because it is funny that there's these two different narratives going on. One that he's basically like on the traditional Odyssey, and one that he's on some sort of lads 10 year long holiday. Yeah, and one of the things she does so cleverly is there's that I roll about Odysseus. Penelope is also really smitten. So she, she finds a place for both truths. And in fact, it's the failure to carry all these different truths that is behind the massive blind spot Penelope has. And you know, that was very, very, very good on flawed feminism, where it consists to hood. So there's a sisterhood up to a point, but it's fragile because of course it's in the end.

12:20Penelope's trauma card is a status. So although all the women in this story and all the women in Homer's world are subject to the same male dominion, it really depends on where you are in the social pecking order. And those maids are doomed. They are enslaved to the moon. They can't marry. They have no agency. They don't own their bodies. They are whoever's, whoever wishes them to be. And they briefly have a moment of apparent equality with Penelope on those long nights unpicking the weaving. And Penelope also kind of longs for friendship and sisterhood and doesn't have that. So you kind of understand where it goes wrong. But in the end Penelope, they were all up against it. But Penelope really, really missed the ball. She really didn't see. She cared for them, but she didn't protect them when it came to it.

13:21And she's furious with the circumstances that got her so compromised that she was having to fight for her own life too. So it's properly complicated. And then on top of all of that, because we're all in Hades. We're all dead. We're all dead, but very chatty and very physical. Although we've got no heads. She just messes with your mind. So we're enacting these scenes in Penelope's story. Penelope sets out to rewrite, to sort of do a better press job on her reputation. You know, she wasn't just a weeping, wimpy, dormatical weaving wife. She, you know, she had great ideas and she was really resourceful and a great survivor. And so she would like to set that record straight. So she is reaching out to maybe some kind of day trippers from the world of the living who've come down to Hades. So she wants to set the record straight. So she has an open channel of communication to the world of the living

14:23and the maids jump on that channel. And then you get these kind of competing, a kind of hotly competitive, collaborative storytelling. She can tell her tale, but she's not going to get off the hook this time. And the maids use everything. In the book of the Penelope had a when you read the play, obviously you don't see the dancing and you don't hear the music. And we've got amazing music. Yeah, I bet. The harmonies and the singing and the movement is really a story in the rehearsal room. And we're sitting around, you know, with our highlighters and our pencil cases in our leggings. Absolutely. Can we talk about the crying? Because this is something else that sort of outweigh makes a joke about is the fact that Penelope in the Odyssey spends almost all her time. In fact, like, at what says 25% of her life, sobbing. Yes. Do you have to do a lot of crying for this or has that been cut out? It's not that it's been cut out. There's just a very little bit of thing. There's a stage director that says she wipes away a tear at one point.

15:26Penelope pretends to fry to keep the suitors at bay. But it's interesting as the story rolls to its terrible, unavoidable tragic end. Well, avoidable, actually, that's what's so bad. It really is hard not to be wobbled by it when you do it. So it's not like a plan of, oh, I'll cry here or I won't cry there. When you read it all the way through, it just has a power of its own. So you're up in York? Yes. And this might again be something that it looks like from the outside, but you'll be able to tell me if it's true or not. Given that you are from the north, you seem to have spent more of your career in the north than in the south. Is that right? Is that accurate? Yeah. Why is that? How has that happened? Because I'm a very lucky woman. Well, good boy. I think the start of this lucky, extremely lucky confusion is I went to university.

16:28And Manchester. And I stayed there from 18 to 28. And the work I began to get after uni was in Manchester and in the north west. And then quite early on against all the odds I got to part on Coronation Street, in which I played a yuppie on the new side of the street. She was a solid girl. So that I think is probably how it began. And then, you know, you do tend to get things because of other things. So one thing leads to another like I couldn't be happier about it. And this will sound really silly, but I'm going to say it anyway. I got my hereditary DNA done right to see. I was hoping to find out what I was going to dial if it was going to be any time soon. And ideally was I French. I wasn't. Wasn't French. I was nearly as Scottish as my Scottish husband. He was really sweating it from it. Actually got his report. Cropped up a lot was Yorkshire.

17:29So I'm just saying. I'm just saying that I know it's clutching its jaws. But for them, I am a Londoner. Even worse than that. I'm actually a Chelsea girl. I have ended up being allowed to permitted the great unspoken permission givers of Northern work have let me in. I don't know why, but I'm extremely glad they did. My dad was a Chelsea boy. Well, no, he came from. Yeah, he grew up the house he lived in. It was knocked down, I think, because it fell down. But yeah, he grew up in a house on Sydney Street. In fact, you can see the scar of the house that he grew up in on the house that exists next door of it still. Suddenly streets in GoodKnit. Why did that? Why did his house? I don't know. I mean, it was a castle property. It was like 13 kids. I don't know. I don't know if it just wear a tarot fell apart. Oh, yeah, baby. Call it football is back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality.

18:32Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Talking of the North. Can we talk about Riot women? Yes. Can we talk about Sally Waverite at last time I spoke to you because she's amazing. And yet, you've worked with her again now. It went down an absolute storm. Of course it did because it's just such a great snapshot of what a thankless task it is to be a middle-aged woman. Like what? You know, to be squeezed from both ends to have parents that need looking after and kids that need looking after. To be red hot and angry all the fricking time. I bet it was a ball to make just you and such a fantastic group of women.

19:32Was a ball to me. It was scary because, for practically all of us, not Rosie, not Rosalie Craig because she's, you know, a musical theatre diamond. You know, she can do all of that. And be somebody else doing all of that. And even like the way she sings is Kitty is not how she's ever sung. It's not how she would normally. You know, she could do Steven Simon-Diamonds. She could do anything she wished to do. But for the rest of us, and that was fine because of course, Kitty is there when, when Beth discovers Kitty is like, opening, you know, finding an incredible talent in this town. But the others of course they don't have, so we didn't have the pressure of having to be amazing. But we did have to be good enough to not bring everything to a standstill every day and not mess it up. And of course you don't want to be the one who is messing up with all that. So it was, but that, the nerves of it, that was part of it too.

20:32Because then when it went, when we did play together and it turned out it was possible, that was a massive buzz. And it was very, very good for on you. What was your old background in playing a guitar? Had you ever picked that one before? Oh wow, how long? No. You're carrying it to go six weeks to learn to play guitar. How long did you give yourself? Six months. And they gave us a really good, Rige. We had a teacher, we had things we had to learn, we had exercises, and then, you know, fears are wonderful things. So we did our homework because we were all too terrified not to do our homework. And then we all got together on this particular date. And then that's when we first played together. But the teachers were quite medium towns in. Both were taught by a really, really good and nice guy called Nick Pinchmeck. And he would sort of give us a bit of inside info on how the other one was doing. But very positive about the other person, perhaps setting up a little bit of keeping you on your toes because Tamsin was doing very well over there.

21:38And so they just, they, I guess they knew, they knew individually how we were all doing. And then I guess that helped the sister dynamic there because that is very sisterly. Isn't it to be in direct competition to be like, I mean, I've only got one sister and it seems dark to say this. I don't need to be the best one, but I don't want to be the worst one. It's just because we were both quite good at something, you know, it's there is a sort of innate competition. Yeah, I don't have a sister. I wish I did. So I don't know firsthand what that's like. I know from friends and yeah, all these things going on. I just, yeah, I don't have, don't have first time experience of that. In fact, I've got two older brothers and I was sort of off the hook in terms of any kind of competition because when you're little, you can't do anything that they can do. That's forget the best you can hope for is inclusion. Not what parity, forget it.

22:39It made them just let you in. It's a small way. So I was very happy with that. Actually, I think inclusion is it's always good enough actually. What can you tell us about series two of right women? I mean, it's okay if the answer's nothing, but I felt I needed to. Really, really, not even for sort of core reasons or NDA reasons or anything like that. Just we don't start till next year. Haven't seen scripts. Don't know what happens, but I do know we'll be back in heptantown. I would love to. Yeah, I have to was very patient with us because you know is it's inconvenient. You put up a sign that says a pub isn't what the pub is, but it's so another pub. And you close roads often you got massive great cables everywhere, but they were very, very patient and forgiving. Something that you are in coming up soon, I'm not sure. I've seen it on the BBC preview service, but I'm not sure if the exact date is the marble hall murder.

23:41Yes. Which I did watch some episodes of. You have almost all your scenes with Leslie Mamba. What joy that must be. Nice of joy. Yeah. She's just amazing isn't she? She is. And the closer up you are, the more amazing she is. I really, really enjoyed working with her in those scenes. Yeah, I can't really say much more about that because it's sort of butter wouldn't melt part. But it was very, very enjoyable to work with her. Yeah, she's great. Talk a little bit classics. Jen and I, my colleague and I were to see her in. You did miss Adapest, yeah. And as we walked in, Jen didn't really know that much about the plot of Adapest. And we'd been really looking forward to it because Leslie Mamba. I mean, I love Mark Strong, but we really were there for Leslie Mamba. And as we walked in, there was a sign that said that Adapest's mother would be played by somebody else. And I went, oh no. Like that. Like that.

24:41And Jen was like, what? And she said, but she doesn't play like Adapest's mother. So I was, I was all right after that, but I had spoiled the entire play for Jen. That's great. I usually ask people what they're doing next, but I actually want to bring up the last time that I asked you that question. Because we met, you and Jen and I met. We were at the national theatre, we interviewed you. And I asked you at that point what you were doing with the rest of your year. And you said, I've got nothing in my diary. I'm not going to worry about it. Maybe I'll take a year off. And if I end up taking a year off, so be it. And that interview was, I think, on the second of March 2020. So now I always think about you saying that. I think you can't prove that it was because we basically all did take a year off, didn't we? That we didn't know at that point. And the fact that I'm talking to you on Zoom now, rather than in the flesh, which we did last time, is an indication of how much our industry has changed.

25:43Was changed by COVID, you know, technology moved on and stuff. And I just wondered, how different is it for you now post COVID as an actor? Has it has it left a lasting impact on how you do things? What a good question. Okay. Oh, no. You've reached the end of the free bit of the podcast to hear the rest of it. And to never have to hear an advert again, get yourself over to the Patreon page for more information. I said there was a link in the show notes. There would definitely be a link in the show notes. When Fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's Fall Drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy to layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence. Whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over, check out the latest arrivals in store and on Lululemon.com now.

26:56Nick Eek Laser, this stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day, so... November 19th, Yamavath Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrative. Tickets on sale now at Yamavathether.com. Don't miss Nick Eek Laser, Yamavath Theater.