Arguably the entire point of the first play to be programmed at the National Theatre by its new boss Indhu Rubasingham comes around five minutes from the end – after the actual plt has wrapped up – when Ukweli Roach’s Dionysus adds the mantle of ‘god of theatre’ to his celestial portfolio and dedicates the NT’s Olivier theatre to us. And if the hour and 40 minutes that precede this moment are messy, I’d say they are entertainingly messy.
Bacchae is of course based on Euripides’s classic Greek tragedy nasty of the same name, and is the debut play from Nima Taleghani. He’s hitherto been better known as an actor, and while his biggest gig is Heartstopper, I knew him from Jamie Lloyd’s gorgeously rhythmic-but-serious Cyrano de Bergerac of a few years back. I’d wondered if his hip-hoppy take on Euripides might be similarly solemn.
In fact it’s nothing of the sort: colourful, irreverent and frequently goofy, its sillier moments reminded me of those hip hop Shakespeare plays that sometimes pop up at the Edinburgh Fringe (The Bomb-itty of Errors and such). It begins with the redoubtable Clare Perkins introducing us to her all-female posse of dysfunctional Dionysus worshippers, aka the Bacchae. ‘Not even Zeus can steal my thunder, fam’ she declares.
It’s fun to spend time with them, as they swear and argue and rage, but there’s the nagging sense that it’s not clear where their story is going. Frankly it also seems a bit unexpected that a male writer would be out to reclaim Bacchae as a feminist work.
And that proves to be the case: this eventually proves to still be a story about two men. There’s Roach’s Dionysus, a preening, showboating, sequin-encrusted glitterball of rage who has led his wandering band of female cultists to Thebes in a gesture of revenge against its princess: his aunt Agave (Sharon Small), who he believes rejected him as a child when he sought refuge there after his dad Zeus’s wife Hera vengefully incinerated his human mum (classic Greek gods).
The other man in Pentheus, Agave’s son, played by James McArdle, an actor so absurdly good that he feels like he’s doing everyone a favour by being there in a role that’s quite light on stage time by his standards. It seems like he’s having a lot of fun regardless. In his early phases his king of Thebes is a scenery chomping dickhead, who delights in grumping his way through Taleghani’s rhymes in a very ‘dour middle-aged Scottish guy’ way. It’s virtually panto villain material as he seeks vengeance on the women who have abducted his mother. But Taleghani’s script becomes more sympathetic later on, and McArdle meets it spectacularly well. As in the original, Roach’s Dionysus tricks him into heading out into the wilderness to meet his mother. But here the two men – Penthus now wearing a dress for Reasons – bond, and immortal Dionysus experiences deep regret that he never got to grow up with his sensitive, complicated cousin, who expresses his own sorrow that playing dress up in his boyhood was the only time he was ever truly happy.
The two men’s scenes together are fleeting but – the last five minutes aside – feel closer to the point of the retelling than the Bacchae scenes, which are entertaining but relatively extraneous. Taleghani’s women have names, back stories and personalities, but little real agency.
Did I say it was messy? Rubasingham’s production starts with the sight of a giant blood-covered white horse – respect to designer Robert Jones for something that will definitely be haunting my dreams – and two Theban soldiers shouting that the queen is lost, before a needle drop and Perkins lurching on to say that we’re not doing that sort of play here today. What sort of play? I’m not sure that gigantic phantasmagorical blood soaked puppet animals are a cliche! I actually wish they were!
There are swings and misses in Taleghani’s script. The recurring suggestion the Bacchae are ‘migrants’ and that’s the reason they’re treated with fear feels both an underdeveloped attempt at topicality and also weird, given they are self-confessedly wandering around toppling the regimes of people on Dionysus’s shit list.
There’s also the question as to whether it even works as a tragedy after all Taleghani’s fiddling, jokes, microsubversions and humanising of both Pentheus and Dionysus. I would say… no, it doesn’t, and you’ll get more mileage out of it if you don’t treat it as a tragedy. But certainly there are reasons why The Bacchae in its more classic form has lasted for two and a half thousand years and I feel it’s unlikely this will be doing the same.
Bacchae reminds me a lot of Everyman, the play that opened Rufus Norris’s tenure at the NT: both were visually spectacular, aggressively modern takes on centuries old tales with something of a ‘welcome to your National Theatre’ subtext, both were kind of sloppy but boosted by luxury casting. It’s not a staggering start for Rubasingham, but it has got the whole ‘ta da here I am’ thing out of her system in pretty diverting fashion.
