THE BACCHAE. To 12 February.

The Bacchae
by Euripides New text by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy

Kneehigh Theatre Tour to 12 February 2005
Runs 1hr 45min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 October at Liverpool Playhouse

Inventive theatricality expores and illumines a classic play.Like Theatre de Complicite, Cornwall's Kneehigh is a physical and visual theatre company that has taken on established scripts with winners all-round. This is very much a Kneehigh show, ever-evolving throughout the performance, mixing overt theatricality, low comedy and stunning visual poetry. It isn't (no Kneehigh show would ever want to be) the last word on the play, but while always recognisably in the company's approach and style, it illuminates Euripides with versatile theatricality that is never gratuitous or self-indulgent.

Like stand-ins for an all-male Matthew Bourne ballet, the male cast members swan around in filmy white skirts. These Bacchae, in their unreasoning celebrations, are not lining up for a Carry On, joys of sex orgy. Women played by men, their rites are as likely to be grotesque as erotic, based on surging, temporary emotion devoid of social or personal control: ego-less rampant id.

Among these King Pentheus, his mother Agave and his secretary start out very straitlaced, bound in close-fitting military constume or dresses, the women's hair coiled tight. A small desk and chair descend for Pentheus, creating an oasis around which the stage mess indicates how limited his control really is, while ladders reach to heights his mind never contemplates.

So it's fitting Agave, once she's been freed from rational self-control, should spend so much time high up, waiting the moment when freedom leads her to destruction, bloodied and semi-naked.

Pentheus is alone in not addressing the audience, though he moves among them, trying to escape his tormentor Dionysus. Sitting in a theatre box, crawling through the stalls, his nemesis always finds him. Yet friendly as Dionysus can appear, the tragic culmination sees him raised from the ground, remote and bouncing back responsibility for events on to Agave and her 'fellow' maenads.

This is also an origami show, comedy coming from rolled and scissored papers, producing results such as a paper chain of recruits inspected by Pentheus, also making the point that men can be crushed as easily as newsprint.

Such constant inventiveness, ranging through a wide palette of theatrical tones and mixed with precise dramatic judgment, is the sign of a great director. Whether that's how Emma Rice will turn out with this ensemble, time will tell, but if she were 30 years older, male, European and speaking with slow gravity, I bet we'd be calling her that already.

Cast:
Charlie Barnecut, Andy Brodie, Dan Cabham, Leonie Dodd, Craig Johnson, Giles King, Robert Lucskay, Eva Magyar, Sarah Moody, Mike Shepherd

Director: Emma Rice
Designer: Bill Michell
Lighting: Malcolm Rippeth
Composer/Musical Director: Stu Barker
Choreographers: Eva Magyar, Emma Rice
Company voice work; Wendy Greenhill

2004-10-24 16:39:10