Irony has become so siamese-twinned with ‘post-modern’ that you fear to separate them would cause bleeding from heart and brain. It’s easy to forget it was the Greeks who started it. Euripides’ Bacchai (now playing at the National Theatre in a production by Peter Hall) is deeply, disturbingly ironic.
Hall’s use of traditional masks (criticised in many reviews for destroying the humanity of the piece) and the bare amphitheatre stage, for me, underlined the irony and the modern echoes.
The foyer exhibition of designer Alison Chitty’s sketches clearly showed these ‘modern’ elements are not accidental. She has news photos of Afghan women in burqas, of Palestinian ‘collaborators’ dragged through the street, their bodies savagely ritualistically abused and exhibited: her costume and mask designs derive directly from these images of contemporary savagery.
Euripedes was the most secular, jaded, humanist of the classic Greek tragedians (in a society where questioning the gods could lead to the death penalty) and the Bacchai, one of his last plays, paints a very grim picture of divinity.
Dionysus (Bacchus), divine offspring of Zeus and Semele, mortal daughter of Cadmus founder of Thebes, returns from Asia with his female cult followers to Greece, to Thebes and his mother’s grave. His mother’s sisters deny his claim to divinity, claiming that Zeus’ paternity was a made up story to cover the family honour. Dionysus wants revenge and recognition. He is the god of wine and frenzy, and infects them with his elemental madness. All the women of Thebes run off to the hills to dance his dance. When we first see them, the Asian bacchantic chorus, seem to embody freedom, female pleasure as against the grim militarism of the Theban men.
Cadmus has handed over power to his grandson, Pentheus (Dionysus’ cousin). Pentheus, ‘beardless’, young and insecure in his manhood, responds with an iron fist. His black padded uniform is the generic dress of riot police and urban military everywhere. He will have the women chained, dragged back, imprisoned, including his own mother.
He is warned his policy will lead to disaster. Cadmus and Teiresias, now ancient old men, drape themselves in the doeskin and ivy of the bacchantes and totter off to join them. It is here Euripides’ satire is at it s most vicious. Old men aping the young, not out of conviction but purely cynically, now where have we seen that before? Cadmus tries to persuade Pentheus it’s no bad thing to have a god in the family. Pentheus accuses Teiresias of profiteering from prophecy. Nobody’s motives are pure. Even gods are susceptible to flattery.
The most terrible irony, though, is when Pentheus confronts Dionysus, disguised as a priest, who persuades Pentheus to dress as a woman and spy on the bacchantes. Pentheus agrees rather too readily, his brittle hyper-masculinity, like a gay nazi, transforming into its apparent opposite. We, post-Freud, enjoy a knowing frisson. Dionysus says he will lead Pentheus up the mountain but he must find his own way down. Pentheus eagerly consents: he will come down with his mother. Delicious irony!
When Agave appears brandishing her son Pentheus’ severed head, believing it to be a lion cub, we taste the bitter irony of our complicity. As audience, we’ve been willing this outcome all along – dramatic irony, plot twist, that’s what we’re here for. It’s a horrific moment when Cadmus, broken now, gently brings his daughter to awareness of what she’s done: torn her son to pieces with her bare hands. I couldn’t help but think of the Palestinian mother, smiling, explaining how her son wants nothing more than to grow up to be a suicide bomber, or wonder what it would be for one of the mob tearing at the ‘collaborator’ to look down and recognise her son.
Greek theatre was a religious and civic ritual as much as an artistic experience, and sacred to Dionysus. Euripides most ironic achievement was to stage this indictment of religious frenzy and manipulated mass emotion in the theatre of the god he depicts so pitilessly. I disagree with those critics who say the masks undercut the play’s humanity. It’s a play about inhumanity, about what we become capable of when we subsume our humanity behind masks – religious, political, sexual, theatrical – and surrender reason to emotion. Even when provoked into by soulless hyper-rationalism. Repression doesn’t defeat emotion, it just transforms it into something blind and terrifying.
Link: Bacchai at the National Theatre
Score: 8/10
Reviewer: Gerry Byrne
