It’s a manifesto, how can it not be. For her first production as the first female Director of the National Theatre, and first of colour, Indhu Rubasingham throws open the doors of the Olivier with an Ancient Greek tragedy about the god of theatre, male hubris and a group of radical women claiming their power.
If it were a triumph, life would be easier; the National in safe hands, theatre saved. If it were a dud everyone could cluck and crow. Instead it’s both, and also everything in between. Refugees, feminism, gender, sexuality, dictators, set to rap and dance…this is a production of wild mood swings, mediated through a production whose beauty often outstrips its substance.
It starts exhilaratingly with a colossal horse’s head dripping blood, messengers breathlessly announcing that the queen is dead, some gorgeous lighting zinging from a circular rig that hovers over the stage like a halo. Then, record scratch, the Bacchae come on and start breaking the fourth wall and having a go at all this lofty dramatic nonsense.
Clare Perkins is their brilliantly ferocious, no-fucks-given leader Vida (the rhyme doesn’t go unnoticed - the play is in rap verse) who introduces us to her Bacchae, a community of landless women who worship Dionysos, god of wine and theatre. They have costumes that look ideal for ripping apart monsters on mountains: rags, leather armbands, facepaint. They love to have sex, get drunk and rail against King Pentheus of Thebes whose misogynistic regime (‘Pentheus thinks it’s ok to hate bitches’) has labelled them a terrorist organisation.
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So, yes, the political resonances have the subtlety of a fist to the face. That’s where the tone of the production starts seesawing, half really cool, half really naff. Updated in verse by actor Nima Taleghani (his debut play, remarkably) it’s a production that falls over itself not to seem stuffy. The Bacchae are crude, wild, joking about blowjobs, but they also are condemned to speak in clunking rhymes, like a teenager has defaced a Dr Seuss book.
There’s also a big problem in the fact that Bacchae essentially has no plot. King Pentheus doesn’t believe his cousin Dionysos is a god. Dionysos punishes him by turning his mum mad. She rips her son apart with her bare hands. It’s only an hour forty, but somehow it feels like it lasts forever – the scene with the talking bull could be cut (as scenes with talking bulls often should be).
A brilliant James McCardle makes Pentheus a blustering impotent tyrant gleaming in military getup. He brings the comedy, flouncing with his little ponytail as he pronounces on why women should be subjugated. Ukweli Roach is a captivating presence as Dionysos. There’s an otherworldly quality to the light, hopping way he moves, and an initially cheery, goofy demeanour which, paired with his spangly gold leisurewear, makes him seem like a cross between a Wiggle and a Pokemon.
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And the Bacchae are migrants but also a community of radical feminists and also all activist groups. It’s a lot, representing all causes at once, and for a long time its muddle seems accidental but then it starts to find something to say. The conflicts of liberalism, the age old questions: what do we do with tyrants? Rip off their penises, eat their limbs and bathe in their blood, as Agave does to her son, or take a more intellectual approach by, say, staging a play?
And meanwhile this aggravating script - Greek-tragedy-for-kids one minute, gags about anal the next, condescending but occasionally really beautiful - clings onto a magnificent production. Robert Jones’s set is a wonder: huge slabs of stacked marble that rotate, creating grand palaces and peaked mountains.
The final minute is an incredible bit of writing where Perkins stands alone on stage and challenges us, and challenges Rubasingham, to work out what a national theatre should be. So how can you not admire this for trying to be everything to everyone? The result is a production that is exactly the sum of its parts, and those parts are many, and some are good, and some are not.
Bacchae is at the National Theatre until 1 November
