A one-woman chamber musical that recasts the wife of Odysseus as the centre of her own story has landed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, running at ZOO Playground (Playground 2, House of Pitman 186) from 24 to 30 August.

Penelope, with music and lyrics by Alex Bechtel and a book by Bechtel, Grace McLean and Eva Steinmetz, takes the character from Homer's Odyssey and shifts the spotlight from the hero at sea to the woman left behind in Ithaca. The show runs approximately one hour and is performed by a three-piece band. Steinmetz directs, with Bechtel serving as music director. The production is presented by Rigor + Ruckus.

Grace McLean stars in the title role. McLean is a performer, writer and composer whose Broadway credits include Suffs, Bad Cinderella and Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. She is also a co-creator of the piece, which was conceived as an experimental musical for a single actor.

The show is a Richard Rodgers Award winner — a prize administered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to support emerging musical theatre writers. A live cast album is also in the works, according to Playbill. The Fringe programme lists the show under comedy, though the material reaches into darker territory: the production presents a character study grounded in Penelope's internal psyche, challenging the long-standing myth of her as a figure of passive patience.

The creative team has deep roots in the project. Bechtel composed the score; McLean, in addition to originating the role, helped shape the book; and Steinmetz, who directs, rounds out the trio of writers. The piece has had concert presentations before, including at New York's Public Theater, where McLean performed it in a concert staging starring capacity.

For Fringe audiences, Penelope fits the festival's appetite for small-scale, formally inventive work — a one-actor show with a chamber score, arriving with American awards pedigree and a Broadway-connected lead. The run is short: six days at the end of August, in one of the festival's smaller venues.

WhatsOnStage reviewed the production on 8 August, with critic Alex Wood covering the Fringe staging.

What sets Penelope apart in a festival famously thick with Greek myth adaptations is its refusal to treat the title character as a footnote to someone else's journey. The show gives her an interior life — frustration, wit, agency — and roughly sixty uninterrupted minutes of stage time to express it. Whether that registers as comedy, as the Fringe programme suggests, or something more unsettled, is a question the hour itself answers.