It’s not every night you get to see the greatest play ever written – except, that’s not true. The Bacchae, first performed over 2400 years ago, is probably on a stage somewhere on this planet every single day. Dionysus’ victory is complete.
And what a play it is. It’s got the Big Questions: What Is God? What Is Truth? What Is Art? And it asks them for real, not via sneaky metaphorical meanings. Euripides is closer to Jez Butterworth, whose Jerusalem climaxes with ancient gods lumbering across our green and pleasant land, than he is to, say, Alan Bennett. The Bacchae literally features a god trying to prove their divine credentials by taking on the role of the Supreme Theatrical Director, and staging a lethal performance on the mountains outside Thebes. As the prophet Tiresias says, ‘I speak not as a seer but of the facts’.
Freyja Harrison-Wood’s interpretation starts tamely enough, with a mound of sleeping women garlanded with flowers and clad in classic Greek shifts sleeping peacefully centre-stage as the audience enters, while Dionysus (Wally McCabe), horned in full demi-god mode, bangs their drum with a beat older than the hills. The rural scene deliberately unnerves arriving audience-members, who can’t be entirely sure whether the play has already started, and have to walk gingerly round the slumbering women. There should almost be a sign saying ‘Mind the Maenads’.
There are hints that modernity awaits however: the set is flanked with brick walls sprayed with graffiti. Is this to be a Bacchae set in an inner-city housing estate?
No. The graffiti-covered walls turn out to be irrelevant. Although this version is turned up to eleven with energy and commitment, it is at heart deeply, and passionately, traditional.
Traditionalism is not necessarily a bad thing. In an era when theatre is constantly striving for new directions, new modes of expression, new ways of seeing old work, there’s room for a production that simply says, ‘Let’s just put it on’. And that’s what happens here.
The Chorus of Maenads rise from their slumber groaning and heavy-breathing like thousands of youth-theatre productions before them. Their semi-balletic movements, manic stares and bad-fairy crouches, jutting knees and elbows, are perfectly choreographed, but evoke every Midsummer Night’s Dream from the last fifty years. Tiresias (Susie Weidmann) is powerful but unmistakeable in blood-stained bandage blindfold, raging against King Pentheus’ (Immanuel Smith’s) obdurate denials.
There’s something almost nineteenth-century about this production, it’s done with such reverence. The dancing, the costumes, the blood, even the maypole atop which Pentheus’s head ultimately perches, and around which the Chorus dances holding the ribbons, feel so English, like they belong more in a production by Herbert Beerbohm-Tree than a group of Oxford students in 2024.
There are moments that resonate with a more contemporary perspective: Dionysus is fittingly pansexual, inspiring the women of Thebes to orgiastic writhing and also seducing Pentheus with a kiss. McCabe has the aura of a god-demon who has given themself over to absolute pleasure, while Pentheus has the nervous heterosexuality of the man who, deep down inside, wants to dress up as his own mother (which he duly does). These are the play’s most thrilling and intimate scenes – moments when The Bacchae becomes more than an ancient text, and speaks to the present day. It brings to mind reinterpretations as radical as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which Tim Curry’s Frank N. Furter/Dionysus and his chorus of unconventional conventionalists wreak a sexual revolution on Brad/Pentheus, Janet/Agave and Dr Scott/Tiresias.
But the sea-anchor holding everything back in Harrison-Wood’s production is the choice of translation.
There are dozens, if not scores, of English versions of The Bacchae to choose from, including many from the last ten years that are poetic, vibrant, accessible and sexually charged (in fact, it’s not a long play, and given the number of talented classicists available within a quarter of a mile of the Keble O’Reilly Theatre, creating a new translation would have been a wonderful opportunity for somebody.) But the one chosen for this show is that by James Edwin Thorold Rogers, from 1872. Thorold Rogers was a political economist and MP. His other published works include A History of Agriculture and Prices in England from 1259 to 1793, A Complete Collection of the Protests of the House of Lords, and The First Nine Years of the Bank of England. His interest in Euripides was that of a full-on Victorian scholar of Greek, not a dramatist, and this is evident from the script. Why choose a version so archaic, so full of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’, so dry, dusty and dead?
Just picking an alternative at random, here is a moment from Robin Robertson’s 2014 translation:
Countless hands pulled and pushed
and tore the fir tree out of the earth,
and from his high roost Pentheus fell,
down, down, down, crashing headfirst
through the branches to the ground,
screaming now as he understood his fate.
His own mother,
like a priestess with her sacrifice, fell on him first.
Here is the same moment as rendered by Thorold Rogers:
The pine was seized by myriad hands and torn
Out of the earth, and Pentheus as he sat
Loftily high fell headlong from aloft
Dashed with full many a groan upon the earth,
His wits returning as he neared his doom.
His mother first essayed the sacrifice.
What we have here is the difference between ‘essaying the sacrifice’ and ‘falling on him first’. The scholarly standard of this Bacchae is beyond reproof, and the music, sound effects, lighting and performances are, almost without exception, brilliantly done. But it doesn’t make you want to run to the hills and rip cattle to shreds. Dionysus may win in the play, but back in the real world, Thorold Rogers is still in charge.