AT a time when Scots touring companies seem to have simultaneously rediscovered the classics - with varying degrees of success - all hail York-based Actors of Dionysus,
specialists in contemporary readings of Greek drama, and it shows. Bacchae is the company getting round to telling the tale of their hero, Dionysus, born of Zeus and Semele and come to tame the doubters of Thebes. With clever cross-casting (there are other reasons than her captivating performance that associate director Tamsin Shasha is Dionysus), and on a simple,
effectively-lit, climbing frame set, the cast is a mere five, most of whom are chorus. This is an athletic, sensual, ritualistic staging that defines a Bacchanalia in terms of pagan culture, the geegaws and scanty animal skin costumes of native cultures, sex and wine.
But the demise of Pentheus, the male mortal bent on the destruction of the god and his Maenad followers, is clearly at the hands of a liberated womanhood, ululating with lust, and his voyeurism and narcissism is roundly ridiculed. And then there are the conscious pre-echoes of the Christ-story in the man who is not accepted as the son of god, and who speaks in allegorical riddles. In language that is often highly poetic, the many layers of meaning in this ancient story are fully explored.
Translator and adapter David Stuttard is astonishingly well-served by his gymnastic cast with only a short passage in the torment of Pentheus (Phil Peleton) by the writhing Maenads (Andrea Ellis, Natalie Cox, and Helen Stern) inexplicably static and discursive - and that is apparent simply because the rest is pure eye and ear candy.
n At Crawford Arts Centre, St Andrews, tonight and Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, on Saturday.
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