The Bacchae

“I’ve always been ‘good’. So has my sister. So have my mother and her mother before her.

But if we were snapped in half like human sticks of rock, would we have ‘good’ written through the spine of us? I know in my heart not – lying next to patience would be wild abandon, next to kindness defiance, next to understanding anger. Maybe not in equal measure - but there they are, threatening to rise up, to bubble through.
And thank the gods, the fates, the luck of the draw that those darker parts can largely stay where they are! Oh, they privately taunt us and shake our bones from time to time, but we can tuck them away, keep them as our secret. But what if we weren’t so lucky? What if we were born somewhere else or at a different time? Do we know that we would never lose control? Never dance ‘til our feet bled, never march into the next village and kill our neighbour?

The Bacchae’ tells the story of this battle between the wild and the tame. The elation of breaking the rules and the terrible price to pay. It implicates us all and asks the question – what would you do?

‘We wouldn’t do that, we hear you say. But we’re all the same at the end of the day’”

Emma Rice - Director

There’s a reason why we still tell the stories that Euripides and his Greek playwriting pals wrote all those years ago. When this show was in rehearsal, you couldn’t move for revivals of Greek tragedies (and still can’t). In working with Emma, Anna and the company on creating a new version of The Bacchae, I discovered what that reason was.

As ever, Emma approached the source material in her own personal and iconoclastic way. She wanted a tutu-clad, all-male chorus playing the women on Thebes, and big Music Hall sing-along numbers for the audience to join in with. She staunchly disregarded the classical conventions Euripides had set up – characters were expanded, journeys threaded through with greater complexity, and there was even the invention of a few new faces (enter Pamela, P.A. to King Pentheus). Gone was the archaic translation. In place, a combination of rap and poetry, haikus and Hungarian god-speak.

The challenge was to  rewrite the story with a modern, entertaining and accessible voice whilst at the same time retaining the dramatic weight and meaning of each scene. Sounds easy? It wasn’t. Why? Because Euripides is The Dude. He knew how to write some kick-ass drama. As Anna and I started to break open and crawl beneath the skin of his play, we began to see the enormity of the challenge we’d set ourselves.

I wasn’t prepared for the psychological depths inherent in his characters or the resonance we discovered along the way. Images and ideas that Euripides had written into his play roughly two and a half thousand years ago were front-page news at the time we wrote this. Be it Guantanamo Bay’s prisoner abuse or the Beslan School Massacre, we were forced to question belief and examine what lengths humanity went to justify those beliefs through unspeakable acts. The themes of the play were televised nightly… Everything seemed to swing back to the shadow of religious and political fundamentalism looming large in the Middle East and the American Right. And for me, this is what our version of The Bacchae was about.

Euripides understodd humanity all too well and he did such a fine and fierce job that (scarily and sadly) the resonance of the play echoes clearly to this day. He wrote what was happening in his political and religious atmosphere at the time and created theatre that reflected that world. With his help, so did we.

Carl Grose – Writer, The Bacchae.