Theatre

Area 10 Project Space Fringe

It’s a strange irony of the sort of free-form, site-specific performance that remains at the cutting-edge of today’s theatre that it can be so much at the mercy of its audience. When I saw this scintillating new version of Euripides’ ‘Bacchae’, in a huge abandoned saw mill in Peckham, those watching numbered barely a dozen: somewhat less than the cast. In a traditional auditorium, this might have spelt death. Here, it made for a unique, exhilarating experience. Dirty Market Theatre undoubtedly deserves to play to far more people, but would crowds of murmuring, shuffling spectators slow things down, dampen the awesome acoustics, lessen the venue’s entirely apt sense of desolation?

Georgina Sowerby and Jon Lee’s production is semi-promenade, and inspired by an ethos of ‘bricolage’, with the set created largely from stuff found lying around the place. The story treats the madness that grips the women of Thebes when the god Dionysus persuades them to ditch their day jobs and flee, boozing and dancing, up in the hills – and the tragedy that befalls King Pentheus when he tries to re-impose order. There is a certain amount of choreographed wailing, flailing and rushing about from the female Bacchants, but generally the sense of dislocation from normality is sincerely and impressively presented.

What grounds the whole thing, though, is a fantastic script by Debbie Kent. She incorporates life-story work from the cast, but doesn’t forget to give us the myth itself, plain and direct, in strong modern vernacular – no modish lingo, no wince-inducing slang. Pentheus’s speech denouncing the renegade god plays subtle homage to Blairite anti-terrorism rhetoric, Gwilym Lloyd declaiming to us over a booming PA from a Perspex lectern, high above the audience.

Lloyd is another definite asset, driving a rock-solid, classical base note under the production’s more contemporary stylings – epitomised by Benedict Hopper’s cross-dressing (then undressing) Dionysus. There are certainly thrills to had from Dirty Market. But oh! What if they sell out?