Theatre group Alum breaks with tradition and puts the female perspective first in The Odyssey and Samson & (a little) Delilah

Theatre company Alum is known for its quirky adaptations of classic stories and likes to choose a different perspective from the dominant one. In the old stories, women are often good if they are subservient and bad if they have traits that we traditionally find more fitting for men as militant, brave, violent or pragmatic. In the coming year, Alum will let you meet two of these women you think you know: Penelope and Delilah.

Delilah is seen in the Bible as a serpent, the false, treacherous lover of the hero Samson, who delivers him unarmed to her people, the Philistines. Our perspective has always been that of the Bible, but now what if you look at this story from the point of view of the Philistines is she not a very brave freedom fighter? And Penelope, that subservient female who can do nothing but wait 10 years for Odysseus who gets hopelessly lost in his journey home after the Trojan War. She is always called the sensible one, but her son won't let her speak. She too deserves more attention than the trad-wife she is in the Odyssey. 

Alum enjoys working with classic stories. Whether it is about patriotic history or Greek tragedy, what fascinates Alum is the voice of the 'other'. Not that of the winners who always wrote history, but that of the colonised, the enslaved, the woman portrayed as traitorous witch, servant or the outcast queer person and so on. Not just for moral reasons but also to make each story richer and add extra layers.

At a time when social debates about representation, decolonisation and gender are becoming increasingly urgent, Alum shows how even age-old stories can still chafe, surprise and connect. In the coming theatre seasons, the company will focus on female characters we think to know, but from a totally different perspective.