Bacchae - making a comedy out of a tragedy

It was with a certain amount of trepidation that my daughter and I went along to the Royal National Theatre production of Baccahe – a new play after Euripides by Nima Taleghani. Friends who had already seen it seemed torn between exhilaration and despair. We liked it. The raw emotive energy of the Bacchantes led by Dionysos (Ukweli Roach) and chief Bacchante Clare Perkins dominated the stage from beginning to end with wild, crazy dancing and some climactic and vivid scenes created from little more than a circular lighting rig and some moving platforms.

The Royal National Theatre, lit up in blood red

Poor old Pentheus (James McArdle) got to flirt with the god, the cousin he rejected, and showed that his utter rejection of the new religion could be tempered by exploring his more feminine side (an extra moment that made one cock one’s head at the suggestion that he was always a little bit over keen on his mother’s dressing up box when he was a little boy). Too late: his end was the same as in Euripides’ play. You still cannot escape Fate. Even if the tragedy kept turning towards being played for laughs, it quickly about-turned and went for shoving back in our faces the nasty truth that the gods move in mysterious, unpredictable and often rather unpleasant ways.

All set for Bacchae

No Cadmus and a messenger himself torn apart– being the bad news rather than the bearer of it. Tireseus (Simon Startin) played more than his fair share of the roles, being something of a commentator as much as the chorus of Bacchantes themselves. No earthquake either, but a strange interlude with a sort of Minotaur-man called Bull or Bubull. Perhaps someone will explain. The dichotomies of the performance can best be shown in moments not far from one another: utter silence and horror at Sharon Small’s Agave’s dawning realization that she has torn off the head of her own son; and then Dionysos, resplendent in gold, ascending to Olympus mid glitter ball and neon strip light. It has it all, I suppose. It was not a traditional tragedy.

Many years ago, when I was a undergraduate student at King’s College London, we put on a couple of performances of Bacchae in Ancient Greek. This would’ve been in about 1985, I believe. I wrote the music and tried to teach the Bacchantes to sing. It was difficult stuff and the show was not a success. A tragedy of a different sort. But I did meet Jane my future wife there, and where my music for the Bacchae failed, the music of George Gershwin succeeded. A rhapsody of a different kind.