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by Euripides, translated by Anne Carson, directed by Jillian Keiley

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

June 16-September 23, 2017

Kadmos: “Gods should not resemble humans in their anger”

The mere fact that the Stratford Festival has not mounted Euripides’ great tragedy The Bacchae since 1993 is almost reason enough to see it.  The fact that the present production is far superior to the previous one should clinch the decision.  The present production uses a new translation by Canadian poet Anne Carson, whose title Bakkhai is a transliteration of the original Greek title Βάκχαι.  Though claiming not to, director Jillian Keiley has taken a feminist approach to the play.  This rather ignores the fact that the women of Thebes are punished as much as the misogynist man who rules them.  Given the importance of the play, it’s a pity the director has not formulated an approach that at least suggests its complexity and depth.

Those familiar with other plays by Euripides such as Medea (431bc) or The Trojan Women (415bc) will find Bakkhai (405bc) quite a different sort of tragedy.  Euripides is known for emphasizing the humanity of his characters often in contrast to the capriciousness of the gods.  Medea, after all, is about a sorceress and granddaughter of the sun god who tries to hold onto her humanity as long as she can before she is compelled to release the demonic forces within her.  Bakkhai, however, takes the unusual step of putting a god on stage – Dionysos himself, in whose honour the competition of tragedies in Athens was first established. 

Dionysos, the god of wine, fertility and religious ecstasy, was the child of the mortal Semele, daughter of Kadmos, the founder of Thebes, and the god Zeus.  Zeus visited her in the form of an eagle.  When Semele begged to see her divine lover in his true form, Zeus reluctantly complied and Semele’s mortal frame could not withstand the power and was blasted by lightning.  Zeus, however, saved the child in her womb, Dionysos, and sewed him up in his thigh whence he was later born.  Born thus from both the bodies of man and woman, Dionysos is androgynous. 

In retaliation Pentheus captures and imprisons Dionysos, but to no avail.  Instead, the god suggests that Pentheus should see the maenads’ rites for himself, the only way to do this being to disguise himself as a woman.  Pentheus does so but this is Dionysos’ trap.  The maenads, including Agave, wreak horrific punishment on the man spying upon them which in turn becomes Dionysos’ revenge on Agave and on all of Thebes.

In her Director’s Notes, Keiley says, “Early on, I tried to make it [the play] into a feminist sex-positive statement.  After being told without ambiguity by the translator-poet Anne Carson that it was not a feminist show, I re-examinied that notion”.  Yet, Keiley doesn’t seem to have re-examined it very deeply because she summarizes the play’s action thus: “These Bakkhic worshippers have burst their way out of a brutal patriarchy to discover sexual liberation and freedom for the first time....  The king is punished for denying the existence of the god Dionysos, not allowing the women worshippers the freedom to practice their sensuous rites – and worse, making sure he steals his own pleasure from the women’s bodies first”. 

The last clause is Keiley’s own imagining and is never mentioned in the play.  More important, what Keiley fails to discuss is that Pentheus is not the only mortal that Dionysos punishes.  His punishment of Agave in causing her unknowingly to dismember her own son and then of Kadmos, his own grandfather, who had nothing to do with Pentheus’ rules against Dionysos, suggests that the play is about much more than patriarchy or female sexual liberation. 

What we see in Keiley’s direction is a conflict between her initial feminist view of the play and her final view that the play is so complex it makes no one statement on any subject.  What remains from her initial view is her depiction of the chorus of bakkhai as engaging in lesbian sex to reach a state of ecstasy.  In the text only wine and frenzied dancing are needed to achieve a bacchic frenzy.  While the text does mention that the maenads leave their conjugal homes and their looms to join together in worship, Keiley seems to forget that they are worshipping Dionysos, a male deity, and that point of their frenzy is to achieve ecstatic union with him.  She arms the chorus with Dionysos’ symbolic staff, the thyrsus, a stick topped with a pine cone but seems not to know that this is a consciously phallic symbol.  If designer Shawn Kerwin had gone farther she could have given the chorus helmets of bull’s heads (the bull being sacred to Dionysos), another symbol of maleness adopted by maenads.

Besides this, Keiley includes a scene of Pentheus masturbating to lesbian porn that he watches on his iPad.  Keiley wants to show that Pentheus is a hypocrite for forbidding women to indulge in sensual pleasure without a man.  Such a scene is wrong, however, because Pentheus represents both repression of desire and repression of belief and to undercut one undercuts the other. 

More specifically, in the text and on stage Pentheus can’t seem to hide his attraction to Dionysos himself and has no objection to the god dressing him as a woman.  Why then does Keiley think Pentheus is punished for wanting to steal “his own pleasure from the women’s bodies first” when she shows how attracted he is to a man?  It’s Keiley’s idea to have Dionysos sodomize Pentheus once Pentheus is dressed as a woman.  What she does not make clear is whether Pentheus allows this because he actually desires it or because Dionysos has placed him under a spell.     

Despite these distractions and Keiley’s narrow point of view, the production is filled with fine performances.  A charismatic Mac Fyfe plays Dionysos as a self-absorbed, louche young man conscious at every moment of his superiority to those around him  Beneath the god’s joking, nonchalant exterior, Fyfe shows us there lies danger and an implacable desire for vengeance.

Gordon S. Miller, now in his eleventh season at Stratford, has finally been given the chance to play a leading role.  The virtue of his performance is that in contrast to Fyfe’s sly, ambiguous Dionysos, Miller’s Pentheus appears as an ordinary, rational man who unsurprisingly has difficulty in believing his aunt has given birth to a new god and who quite naturally opposes anyone who incites madness among the population of his city.  Much as Keiley tries to make him the villain of the play for opposing women’s freedom, Carson’s text and Miller’s performance suggests that Pentheus is simply trying to keep peace and order in Thebes much as that may mean enforcing traditional rules and gender roles.  Miller makes Pentheus seem less a tyrant and more like Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone, a ruler who is punished for trying to uphold the law as far as he understands it.  While Keiley would like to have Pentheus’ motive for spying on the maenads be his voyeurism, in performance Miller’s Pentheus seems more eager to verify whether the fantastic reports he has heard of the maenads’ rites are true.          

Lucy Peacock gives a terrific performance as Agave in one of the most gruesome recognitions scenes in Greek drama.  Her eyes flash about unseeing as she giddily shows the “trophy” she has snatched from killing, as she thinks, a lion cub.  Guided by questions from the Kadmos of Nigel Bennett, filled with infinite pity, Peacock’s Agave slowly comes to her senses which also means slowly coming closer to realizing the terrible act she has committed.  This is perhaps the best directed scene in the play since Keiley and Peacock have decided rightly that quiet horror is more powerful than screams.

Seven female actors make up the Chorus of Bakkhai who harmonize well enough together but whose individual voices range from strong to weak.  While their choreographed movement is impeccable, one wonders whether chanting their verses rather than singing their pop-songlike settings would not be a stronger method of communication.

Shawn Kerwin’s designs reflect the confusion of purpose in Keiley’s direction.  There is nothing wrong with dual-period garb.  Kerwin dresses the Chorus of Bakkhai in an ancient style of simple tunics and long cloth head-coverings and Pentheus and his Servant in modern suits.  But some choices are unhelpful.  Why dress Teiresias as an old hippie in Birkenstocks and socks except for a joke?  When Pentheus is advised to wear women’s clothes so that he won’t be noticed by the bakkhai, why does Dionysos dress him in a flamboyant red party dress, huge blonde wig and high heels when we know the bakkhai look nothing like that and go barefoot?  How are we to believe that Pentheus climbed a tree as per the Servant’s report if he was dressed like that?  And why, after the most gut-wrenching scene in the play after the blood-drenched Agave realizes what she done, does the Kerwin have the Servant re-clothe her in a tarty, black midi dress with a zipper running from plunging neckline to hem?  This is a mother who is grieving for her son.  Why ruin the mood of this grief so pointlessly?

Despite these flaws in design, direction and music, Bakkhai is still worth seeing for its powerful performances.  Indeed, given how seldom English-speaking classical theatre companies venture away from Oedipus and Antigone, the chances of seeing Bakkhai in any form are slim.  It is an ancient tragedy that is still highly controversial. 

Euripides’ tragedies often take the side of human beings suffering from the fickleness of the Greek gods.  It is clear in Bakkhai that Dionysos’ punishment of Pentheus, Agave and the whole of Thebes is out of proportion to their supposed crimes.  When Dionysos sends Kadmos into exile at the end, Kadmos exclaims, “Gods should not resemble humans in their anger”.  We have to wonder whether rather than portraying the Dionysian revels as a form of freedom if Euripides is instead criticizing the new god’s religion as a new form of enslavement and its founder as a tyrant who is fatally both all-powerful and childishly cruel.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Chorus of bakkhai, Lucy Peacock (centre); Mac Fyfe as Dionysos holding a thyrsus; Gordon S. Miller as Pentheus; Lucy Peacock as Agave.  ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.