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by Hawksley Workman & Christian Barry, conceived and directed by Christian Barry

2b theatre company, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

June 3-29, 2014;

Studio Theatre, Stratford

September 11-13,18-20, 2014

“You know what it is that makes us

You know what it is that breaks us”, from “Invocation”

           

The God That Comes must be the most unusual show the Tarragon has ever hosted.  Canadian indie rocker Hawksley Workman, born in Huntsville, Ontario, has created a one-man glam/electrofolk/pop cabaret that retells the story of Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae (405bc) for a modern audience.  It is a gruesome, horrifying tale about the violence that erupts in an overly repressive society.  Workman’s music is by turns sly, witty and aggressive and his performance of it is fantastically intense, revelling in the story’s depictions of anger, frenzy and release.

Before beginning his music, Workman tells the audience the story of The Bacchae without using that name or the names of the characters.  He calls the three main figures simply the King, the King’s Mother and the God.  To help readers relate the story to figures in Greek mythology they will know, I will summarize the tale with the original names. 

The God of wine, sex and art of Workman’s cabaret is Dionysus, son of the god Zeus and the mortal Semele.  Dionysus has wandered through Asia collecting a cult of female worshippers, the Bacchae, known in English as the Bacchantes.  They gather on Mount Cithaeron near Thebes and hold revelries (“bacchanalia”) that include orgies and animal sacrifice.  In Workman’s version the celebrants hold their revelries in order to make the god appear to them.  Thus, he is “the god that comes”, but Workman always phrases the statement so that the verb can be taken as an erotic pun. 

The King of Workman’s tale is Pentheus and the Mother is Agave, sister of Semele and daughter of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes.  After Pentheus becomes king, he is disturbed by the savagery and licentiousness of the bacchanalia and is determined to end them.  He has a personal reason, too, in that Agave and his aunts have reportedly joined the Bacchantes along with a growing number of Theban citizens.  Pentheus manages to have his soldiers arrest Dionysius and bring him in for questioning. 

The god denies all wrongdoing and challenges Pentheus to see for himself what happens at night on the mountain.  Since Dionysus’ followers are mostly women, the god advises Pentheus to visit their revels in female disguise.  This Pentheus does and climbs a tree to observe the celebrants.  Unluckily, drunk on wine, sex and violence, the Bacchantes mistake Pentheus for an animal and pull him limb from limb, his own mother being the one to tear off his head and carry it on a pike into Thebes.  When Cadmus sees what Agave has done, he exiles her and her sisters from Thebes forever.

From a euhemeristic point of view, the tale reflects the history of the arrival in ancient Greece, the seat of logic and rationality, of the mystery cults from Asia that celebrated all that was irrational in humankind.  From a psychological point of view, the tale points to the danger of trying keep primal urges repressed without giving them an outlet.  That outlet is art, which is why Dionysus became the god in whose honour Greek tragedies were written. 

Workman naturally is most interested in the psychologial side of the myth along with its implication that beneath the veneer the civilization lies the savagery of primal humanity only barely held in check.  His cabaret is really a song-cycle that plunges us first into the wild world of the bacchanalia then shows us Pentheus’ and Agave’s response to it, Pentheus’ interrogation of Dionysus, Pentheus’ secret pleasure in dressing up as a woman and finally his death and its aftermath.

In Workman’s interpretation, Pentheus is a right-wing military commander whose uncompromising stance against intoxication, women and homosexuality merely masks his hidden fascination with all three.  As Workman sings in his “Invocation”, “His heart beats hard when he thinks about what happens in the dark”. Workman’s glam rock idiom becomes the perfect medium to represent the world of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll that Pentheus opposes but which, itself, is the outlet for repressed emotions.  For Workman, Dionysus’ followers are not just women, but slaves, foreigners and anyone who doesn’t fit into the “normal” society Pentheus tries to promote.  Indeed, in the rhythmically and thematically brutal song “Wild Abandon” of unfettered emotion ending in Pentheus’ destruction, Workman, stamping on a sounding board with his feet while pounding on it with two sticks, seems to become possessed himself. 

Workman himself is a fascinating artist and performer.  His twelve songs for the 75-minute show run from hard rock to folk to gospel to Hawaiian kitsch to Weillian satire.  Workman accompanies himself on percussion, keyboards, electric guitar, ukelele, gourd kalimba, his own stamping feet and, most memorably, a harmonica hidden in the nether parts of a female mannequin.  Use of an echo device allows him to sing and play duets in one song with remnants of the sounds of the previous song.  He often sings in his own growling light baritone, but he easily shifts into an extensive falsetto.  This is used to great effect in “Remember Our Wars” where he sings Agave in falsetto and Pentheus in a baritone through a megaphone or in the lovely song “If Your Prayer”. 

For this show, the lower half of the Tarragon Mainstage auditorium has been turned into cabaret seating at twelve tables with drinks service as befits a show about the god of wine.  The set design by Louisa Adamson and Christian Barry, with red curtains and its marquee lights reinforces the cabaret atmosphere.  Vardy’s lighting cleverly manages to blend typical nightclub lighting with more theatrical effects that capture the changing mood of each song.

I heard some older patrons complain that the music was too loud, but really the volume levels were appropriate to the scenes depicted and nothing like the ear-splitting decibel count one suffers in many touring musicals.  The album Songs from the God That Comes is available on iTunes so you can listen to 60- to 90-second excerpts of the songs to get a taste for the great variety of Workman’s music.  Better yet, see the show and be surprised, overcome – perhaps even possessed.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Hawksley Workman as Pentheus; Hawksley Workman as Pentheus disguised as a Bacchante. ©2013 Trudie Lee.

For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com or www.stratfordfestival.ca.