skepticlawyer

When Australian Jonathan Mills was appointed Director of the Edinburgh International Festival, arguably the world’s most high-powered arts job, not a few locals were shocked and a wee bit pissed off.

Watching his excruciating ‘interview’ (billed as ‘conversations with artists’, supposedly designed to illuminate The Bacchae, or rather, the National Theatre of Scotland’s innovative production) yesterday afternoon, it was hard not to agree.

This was a ‘conversation’ where Mills persisted in talking over the artists (Alan Cumming, the male lead, David Greig, the co-translator, and John Tiffany, the director). Worse, he couched his questions and comments in impenetrable postmodernist psychobabble and insisted on spruiking Festival shows (like L’Orfeo, reviewed here) that have finished their run. He failed to notice that the audience was becoming restive, and the whole exercise finished on a sour note when he argued with an elderly Scots gentleman sitting directly in front of me. The man complained (quite legitimately), about Mills ‘running adverts’. The conversation became louder and more irritated, other people started to join in, and Mills marched out in a huff. He was still thunderous when Deus Ex Macintosh saw him outside The Hub in an official festival vehicle.

I was in despair by this point, and not only because I have a noticeable Australian accent, and Mills’ carry-on was guaranteed to make any Australian in the auditorium want to disappear through the floor. The three Scots on stage showed how it was possible to be passionate about the arts and not be an artwanker, a skill that seems to be in short supply. Greig in particular was both highly literate and engaging, and is definitely a writer to remember. Among other things, they managed to convey much of the desperately hard work that goes into preparing a play for the stage. Other pieces of background were simply fascinating: Euripides didn’t live to see his work staged, and the three gave enlightening rationales for moving bits of the 2,500 year old script around and for making the language as simple as possible.

The production itself (which we saw later in the evening) is superb, and Alan Cumming (pictured) completely convincing as the campy, almost feminine God who finds every city’s gates open to him save his own.

Dionysus returns triumphantly to Thebes, the city of his (most unusual) birth, expecting the reverence that is his due. Instead, he find his cousin Pentheus in charge, and - not to put too fine a point on it - Pentheus thinks Dionysus is a poof who encourages the city’s women to get above themselves. Oh, and root sundry men who are not their husbands - that’s very important. Tony Curran is excellent as the patriarchal Pentheus, and the scene where Dionysus convinces him - ala Queer Eye for the Straight Guy - to cross-dress in order to sneak himself into a spectacular women-only ritual goes through gay and comes out the other side.

When he wrote the Bacchae, Euripides had watched Sparta - a city-state with a very different conception of the status of women - slowly strangle Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Much of the Bacchae concerns gender roles (even in his own day, Euripides’ portrayal of women perplexed his fellow Athenians, with accusations directed at him ranging from misogyny to feminism, most notably from Aristophanes).

The play is engaged with balancing intellect and emotion, which Euripides stereotypically ascribes to men and women respectively. Where he is interesting is in what he does to the stereotype: for the first part of the play, Pentheus comes across as a sexist twit who richly deserves his comeuppance. During the second part, his predicament arouses both pity and terror. Dionysus, meanwhile, far from being the joyous liberator of human emotion seen during the first part, is a petulant and murderous ninny who demands nothing less than complete adulation.

Director John Tiffany, like all lovers of Euripides, was confronted with the great imponderable of staging Greek drama. That is, what to do with the ‘chorus’, a group of supporting actors who sang their lines during antiquity and remained on stage throughout. In the Bacchae, the chorus is made up of Dionysian maenads (worshippers). Tiffany’s response is to turn them into a gospel choir of religious acolytes. All are black, and all sing beautifully. This works well for the first half of the play, where the historic link between blues, soul and some of the more fundamentalist variations of Christianity grants a true sense of religious ecstasy.

It is less effective as the play progresses, largely because gospel and soul are not angry enough to carry Dionysus and his spurned followers’ increasingly violent hatred of the city of Thebes. One reviewer suggested Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; for mine, Tiffany needs a bit of angry white boy polka. He needs music that screams, a Chester Bennington or Jonathan Davis.

That said, Cumming is so charismatic he carries the production during any flat spots. When on stage he manages to monopolize all focus; when not on it, he’s sorely missed. The opening scene - where he emerges quite literally deus ex machina, suspended upside down like a reversed crucifix and dressed in a gold lame kilt (and yes, we all know what Scotsmen wear under their kilts) is one of the most striking in theatre. Watch this production, and you will never again be dully complacent about religious belief and its ability to ensare the emotions.