Wine, women and snogs

Euripides wrote The Bacchae shortly before his death in 406BC, and it was performed the following year at the Dionysia, the Athenian drama festival, where it took first prize. The play concerns Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and theatre, whose late mother Semele was a member of the Theban ruling family and whose father Zeus is king of the Gods. As the play begins, Dionysus is returning to Thebes after seducing and converting much of what we now know as the Middle East.

To take revenge on his aunts, who called his mother a slut and mocked her claims that she was involved with Zeus, he has driven them into a kind of mad hedonistic ecstasy which will end in bloody murder. That bit was easy, but he faces a greater challenge from his nemesis and cousin Pentheus, prince of Thebes, who considers the liberal pleasure cult of Dionysus a direct challenge to his own steely rule.

The original text has been translated by Ian Ruffell of the classics department of Glasgow University, and then adapted by David Greig, arguably the pre-eminent Scottish playwright of the last decade. It is the staging, however, which will really distinguish The Bacchae from most productions of these ancient classics.

"It's quite out there, what we're doing," says Cumming. "For a start, I don't think anyone will be expecting a chorus of 10 black girls singing gospel numbers."

I certainly wasn't, but from the performance I see in rehearsal at the Lyric theatre, Hammersmith, it is certainly an effective idea. The chorus and Cumming sing and dance through their opening number - "Yes, yes, yes, we are the Bacchae!" - with all the vigour of James Brown and The Famous Flames live at the Apollo. The women of the chorus are a vision in tracky bottoms and leg-warmers. One in particular, Gloria Onitiri, fetching in knee-length mulberry socks, is an awesome singer. Cumming wields a broom handle in place of the mic stand he will have during actual performances. At one point he holds it between his legs and thrusts the other end toward Onitiri's mouth.

Steven Hogget, the choreographer, has some advice for the cast: "The more Tina Turner you can make it, the better." Director John Tiffany wanders over to me. "This is a Greek tragedy," he grins. "Honest."

He explains why he has decided to present the chorus in this way. "I have an allergic reaction to Greek choruses and the received way of doing them, which is that they wear masks, chant and kind of waft around a bit. I think audiences find that very alienating.

"That's what has stopped me doing this play before now. I've wanted to direct it for 15 years, but I didn't know how to do the chorus. I knew I needed a big idea. Then a couple of years ago I decided that if I didn't like that part of the play I should turn it into something brilliant. That got me thinking about religious ecstasy and worship and how that could be shown through music."

The answer, of course, was reinventing the chorus as a gospel choir. Gospel has its roots in African music and is therefore a hybrid of Christian and pagan forms, which also works well for this particular play; the Dionysus myth is thought by some scholars to have been a model for descriptions of the life of Christ.

Casting Alan Cumming as Dionysus is a coup. He is a highly regarded stage performer whose recent credentials include The Threepenny Opera in New York and an acclaimed performance in Bent in London. Back in 1998, he was the Emcee in Sam Mendes' Broadway production Cabaret, an iconic turn for which he won a Tony award and which established him as a star in America.

The Bacchae will be the first time in 16 years that he has been on stage in Scotland, and he is perfectly cast in the role. His stardom, bisexuality, 1000-volt charisma and candour about his own drinking and drug use make him an ideal Dionysus, and there has always been a dark side to his personality and to the roles he plays which chimes with the idea of a god whose commitment to hedonism can easily tip over into destructiveness.

I ask Cumming whether we are right to identify him so closely with the character he plays. "I suppose so," he says, slightly reluctantly. "I think Dionysus understands the importance of letting go, and I certainly advocate that too. I do think it's important to be free and to not have inhibitions and go out and embrace the world, and that's what he represents.

"Also, you bring the baggage of what people know about you to a part, and that adds to the event. So I understand that people see me as a wacky druggy boy. I get that. He's the god of wine and altered states and stuff like that, and I'm this poster boy for debauchery."

It was precisely this idea of the play as a celebration of hedonism which first drew John Tiffany to The Bacchae while studying classics at Glasgow University in the early Nineties. "I still am really attracted to that," he says, "but we've found another way to do it, thank God, rather than setting it in a nightclub with everyone taking E, which was my first thought. In these 15 years I've become much more interested in that central relationship between Pentheus and Dionysus."

Pentheus is played by Tony Curran, the Glaswegian actor who has spent the last few years living in Los Angeles, playing football with Robbie Williams and Rod Stewart, and making popcorn movies. He recently starred in the multi-award winning Red Road, but remains seared on the national psyche as the kilt-wearing plumber who had it away with Ferdy in This Life all those years ago.

"I don't think I've ever felt more exhilarated or inspired than when I've been in a play," says Curran, who played a tough SAS man in ITV's Ultimate Force, but is today missing rehearsal due to a yoga-related injury. "It's your roots. It's like a carnival. You're a gypsy. Prostitutes and actors are the oldest jobs in the world.

"People in Los Angeles, bless 'em, some of them don't understand doing a play. They say to think about your career. But forget all that. What's important is the subject matter and working with people to create something that's very old but made fresh."

The Bacchae marks Curran's first time on stage since David Greig's Victoria seven years ago. "Pentheus reminds me of so many people," says Greig. "I think he is the typical male political leader in his 40s. Paranoia is a way of life for these guys. To get there, they've had to be top dog and now they're trying to preserve their top-doggery.

"I half-jokingly had an idea of Tony Blair as Pentheus, particularly in terms of the war-like belligerence and the paranoia, and then I read Alastair Campbell's diaries and realised the testosterone that was swilling around in that environment, and it made me think even more of Pentheus. Then you might also think of someone like Tommy Sheridan, one of these hard guys of Scottish politics."

The contemporary parallels are there to be found. For example, Dionysus's female followers, the Maenads, have come to Thebes from Persia, modern day Iran. "Yes, there is that resonance," says Greig. "There's a line in the play which I thought resonated through history to Tony Blair, where Tieresias says that the power of persuasion, married to an inexperienced intellect, is a very dangerous thing. I think that is an almost precise diagnosis of the last few years of our foreign policy."

The Bacchae, therefore, taps into current anxiety about immigration and terrorism, but Tiffany and his team insist that in a more significant and general sense it's about male fear of the other', whether that be femininity and sexuality, or unfamiliar cultures, religions and political systems.

It's important to stress, though, that it's supposed to be a fun show, a kinetic theatrical event not weighed down by ideology. "I didn't know the text very well, and expected it to be quite intense, but I found it was terribly funny and terribly camp," says Greig. "Dionysus is the god of theatre, after all. You can really lose jokes in translation, but what I found was that once you started to understand it in terms of what is happening on stage, it's just really genuinely funny. I've not added any of that at all. The humour was absolutely there, waiting to emerge. That was a great revelation to me and a very pleasing one."

It's useful to understand this production, just as Black Watch before it, as a harmonious marriage of the visceral and cerebral. It is designed to make the heart beat faster and no doubt some of that blood will be pumped to the brain. These twin impulses are perhaps exemplified by the fact that during the rehearsal I watch, the song and dance routine is followed by a lecture on ancient Greece.

During that lecture, Ian Ruffell explains that the theatre of the time would have performed to audiences of up to 15,000 people. The atmosphere would have been akin to that of a stadium rock concert. This is key to the look of the production, which leans more towards sequins and feathers than togas.

"I think of Dionysus like a rock star with his groupies," says Cumming. "He's had number ones all over the world except the one place he really wants one - Thebes - and he's come back to get it."

Is Cumming's Dionysus modelled on anyone in particular? "Visually, we're looking at Michael Hutchence, but really it's a collage of people. It's the strutting and the confidence, and also a lot of those rock stars are quite femmey. Their feminine side is very up-front. It's quite a girly thing to do, in a way, stomp around with your top off."

Exactly what Cumming will be wearing in the production is a closely-guarded secret. Do not be misled by the poster which shows him in an elaborate red frock. That's a picture by the American photographer David LaChapelle, known for his outré celebrity portraits.

In the original photograph, it is Cumming's bare derrière which is oot, poking peachily out from the back of the dress. However, on the front of the Theatre Royal's brochure, which advertises the Glasgow run of The Bacchae, his bottom is mysteriously covered, thanks to some computer trickery.

"Shut up!" Cumming exclaims when I break this news. "Have you got it there?"

I take the booklet from my bag. He stares at it. "How disappointing. That's censorship. That's terrible. That's shabby. I'm very disappointed in the Theatre Royal. How dare they? Jesus Christ. It's an insult to David LaChapelle. He's an amazing photographer, and if he found out he'd be furious."

Within the brochure, the photograph remains undoctored. Cumming suggests some kind of enticing sticker on the front cover: "It should say, Bum inside'."

Of course, the fact that the pert rear end of a man from Angus was considered offensive does suggest that The Bacchae's attack on puritanism is relevant and necessary. It is also a production which consciously stands against the idea perpetrated by fundamentalists of various religious stripes that humans are utopian, perfectible creatures.

"The play's message is that to be human is to be irrational and uncontrolled and Bacchic, as well as rational and controlled and logical,"

says Greig. "If we don't recognise the part of ourselves that is dance and wine and sex then that will come back to haunt us. I really engaged with that idea, and felt it didn't matter that the play was written thousands of years ago. It could have been written yesterday."

John Tiffany agrees. "What I really hope is people come and see this and realise that Greek tragedy is not boring. Because it really isn't. They are the most exciting stories, and they're brilliantly tense and bloody and gory and dramatic plays. The Bacchae has lasted 2500 years - that says something, doesn't it? But there is no reason why we have to keep returning to the original form these plays were done in. Theatre isn't an archaeological exercise. It's about connecting with an audience now. This is the fantastic realisation of a dream for me, so it had better be good."

The Bacchae is at The King's Theatre, Edinburgh, August 11-18, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, then the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, August 28-September 1, and the Lyric Hammersmith, September 5-22.

Visit www.nationaltheatrescotland.com for more details