For a show that’s touted by the National Theatre as ‘bold, visceral and unlike anything you’ve seen before’, director Indhu Rubasingham’s and first-time playwright Nima Taleghani’s reimagining of Euripides’ The Bacchae is surprisingly tame.
The whole thing is conceived as a kind of Hellenic rap battle, with the Bacchanalian women givin’ it large, all signs of the horns and plenty of shits and fucks. ‘Oo are yer? Oo are yer? Oo are yer?’ yells Clare Perkins as Head Bacchant Vida, and the response comes: ‘Bak-ak-ak-ak-aiii!’ If Rubasingham’s masterplan as new Artistic Director of the NT is to attract younger audiences by making the classics more relevant to their lives, this approach seems designed to do the exact opposite. It’s a middle-aged person’s idea of what young people are like, and as an approach it’s as awkward and embarrassing as seeing your Dad turn up at a disco with a baseball cap on backwards, holding his groin and swinging a skateboard.
Janet Street-Porter tried this in the 1980s on Channel 4 with her campaign to attract ‘the yoof’, and it made her a national laughing stock. On the Olivier stage it runs the risk of turning off traditional audiences while simultaneously failing to appeal to new ones. The auditorium was barely two-thirds full on a Saturday night, with whole banks of seating as sparsely populated as a peaceful Peloponnesian pasture.
Playwrights regularly recreate The Bacchae. Joe Orton did it with The Erpingham Camp as far back as 1966, relocating the orgiastic violence to a British holiday camp, and most recently it was done in Spain as Las Bingueras de Eurípides (‘the bingo-playing women of Euripides’). So it’s not as if the play hasn’t already been turned inside out time after time from a modern perspective. Taleghani’s treatment feels, if anything, less revolutionary than those earlier efforts. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise. This is, after all, the first time that the Olivier stage has been entrusted to a debut writer. It’s an enormous risk – and enormous risks are what art should be about – but on this occasion it doesn’t pay off. The concern is that, with the amount of experience and expertise available at the NT, nobody in a position of artistic or editorial responsibility seems to have stood up and said, ‘This isn’t working’.
The effect of the rap-stylee dialogue might not be quite so uncomfortable if the performers really came across as purveyors of quality grime from the streets of sarf London. But they sound more like what they are: classically trained actors dipping a nervous toe in a culture of which they have little knowledge or experience. Just as an experiment, I picked one of the Bacchae at random to look at her CV: Ellie McKay, who played Nava. McKay’s credits to date: since graduating from LAMDA, she’s been in Austin, Miss Austen, and The Crown. To reach its target, you can’t help feeling that Rubasingham’s vision needs something more authentic.
In 2019 Jamie Lloyd directed a magnificent production of Cyrano de Bergerac in rhyming hip-hop style written by Martin Crimp, which proves that it can be done. But there are crucial differences between the two efforts. Crimp’s version recognised that Cyrano is, above all, about rhyme. In Rostand's original French, characters spar, court and declaim in elegant rhyming verse, as well as being imprisoned by it. Taleghani’s Bacchae imposes an immature sing-song on a towering masterpiece, like scribbling a Groucho Marx moustache on the Mona Lisa.
This is not to say that there aren’t wonderful things about this production. The ensemble movement is thrilling, and the set and lighting are spectacular, with shafts of Zeus-sent light lifting Dionysus off to the heavens, and a vast, rotating ring of power hovering in the sky above the assembled Thebans. The expressionist hillside itself revolves to give different perspectives on the action (although that revolve needs oiling: it’s not a good look when the machinery in the premier theatre in the land creaks like an old hostess trolley). James McArdle is a tortuously conflicted King Pentheus, and his halting realisation that he wants to dress up in his mummy’s clothes is a moving scene of dawning sexual freedom (on top of which his frock looks frankly gorgeous).
Moreover, Taleghani’s adaptation does come to a persuasively original conclusion. All of this tragedy, comedy and spectacle serve a higher purpose: they form the ground zero of what we now call ‘Theatre’. And Dionysus ascends to Olympus to become the patron saint of Drama. That’s an uplifting conclusion, and it leaves you feeling that you haven’t just watched an ancient play; you’ve witnessed the Big Bang from which all subsequent playwrights, from Plautus to Pinter, took their inspiration. If only it weren’t dragged down by an infantile script full of exclamations like ‘Chill out, you little shit’ and ‘Pentheus the Prick’.