The Bacchai (review)

Post-Auschwitz, -Hiroshima, -Viet Nam, -Jonestown, -Rwanda, -Kosovo, -New York, -Kabul, -Ramallah/Tel Aviv, what are we to make of Euripides' The Bacchai? Who are Agave and Pentheus that we should weep for them? What is Dionysus that we should fear him? We could unfold tales to the Greeks whose lightest word would make their hairs stand on end like twisted girders in a crash crater.

Sir Peter Hall's production of Euripides' The Bacchai reconsiders both the play's relevance to our time and the pertinence of Hall's ideas about casting, masks, and the staging of the chorus. The production, premiering at the Royal National Theatre on May 17, 2002, breaks old ground, even though based on Colin Teevan's new concise and idiomatic translation. Teevan's rendition gives up grandeur for guts. For today's audiences, that is probably the shrewder error. Still, some phrases may be distracting because of unintended connotations. For example, the chorus's cry, "Ite, Bacchai, ite," which usually has been translated as "On, Bacchai, on," is translated by Teevan as "Go, Bacchai, go." The translation probably seizes more of Euripides' power, but, to my midwestern ear, the chorus was changed, for a moment, into the Green Bay Packers cheerleaders.

Three actors play all the characters: Greg Hicks plays Dionysus, Teiresias, and a Servant; William Houston plays Pentheus and Agave; David Ryall plays Cadmus, a Soldier, and a Messenger. The actors wear masks designed by Vicki Hallam, which are painstaking, architecturally-wrought achievements of the stagecraft. Costumers will want to know how she did it. She adapted each to the actors' specific physical and vocal qualities. Speaking through masks requires actors to breathe, enunciate, and project differently from playing unmasked roles.

Hall also raises the stakes through an unusual approach to the chorus of fifteen: only one chorus member at a time speaks the lines while the rest of the chorus dances or moves in harmony with the rhythm of the line and the content of its meaning. This is no place to summarize or debate Hall's views. He explains them in Exposed by the Mask (2000). The verse is his god and he gives it its due, and, perhaps, more than its due. He has warrant. Commentaries by Murray, Dodds, Kirk and other great classical scholars attest to the supreme beauty and complexity of the choral poetry in Greek. Nevertheless, because the chorus also wears masks and appears mainly in shadows, Hall balks the audience's desire to see who is speaking. He wants to incarnate the chorus as a single character. The blocking achieves Hall's desired effect of randomized, non-linearity that is repeated in the tangled black braids of the chorus's wigs and their coverings of old-blood-colored rags, and mud-besmeared semi-nudity of the actors.

The production is especially interesting for its use of simple space and complex sound. A large, raked disc marks the central playing area on the stage of the Olivier. Across the back of the stage sweeps a ramp, rising in a curve from stage right to left, leading from Thebes to Mount Kithairon. When Dionysus assaults Thebes with an earthquake, the disk splits in half and ferocious blasts of fire erupt from flamethrowers beneath the stage. I was surprised that the National's managers did not alert audience members in the first three rows that being exposed to the masks included being exposed to the flames. Neither is Hicks exempt from danger when, as Dionysus, he makes his final appearance upon a small, circular platform that rises forty feet above the stage and then vanishes through the floor at precisely the moment he speaks his final line.

The National granted Hall's request for nine weeks of rehearsals. In Peter Hall's The Bachhai (2002), Croall amply details the company's struggles, false starts, and fears. But it also shows how Hall has not just the actors but all the designers collaborating in...