To view and review MB Productions’ The Bacchae in the context of student theatre is in many ways unfair. It may be performed and created by a group of Oxford students, and first ‘staged’ in Port Meadow in the summer, but in every other way is a professional enterprise. The play has travelled from Cambridge to California, where a Classics professor commented on its “tremendously challenging script to which only an extraordinary company can rise.” High praise indeed.
And it did not disappoint. Despite revisiting the production for the first time since September, the cast retained the slick sharpness which makes the action so compelling. Euripides’ play is traditionally difficult to stage, in attempting to convey the scale of a story that sees Bacchic hordes rampaging through the countryside. Instead of size, director Asia Osbourne instead focuses on intensity, as the six person cast address and enclose the audience. Their aggressive physicality, coupled with rhythmic overlapping speech and sensuous tuneful humming, is somewhat mesmerising.
In fact, the audience’s journey can be seen as reflecting that of Pentheus. We, like he, begin unconvinced, uncomfortable, unwilling to enter into the alien world of Bacchic revelry. As the action develops however, we, like he, become unable to resist the subversive charms of Dionysus and his followers.
These are conveyed variously and effectively by the cast. Will Maynard’s demented Cadmus, monstrous in his depravity, is offset by John-Mark Philo’s frenzied and delirious Teiresius. As a pair they fully showcase the extent of subservience to Dionysus. Agave and Autonoe, Thea Warren and director Osborne respectively, playfully portray the sumptuous, almost erotic elements of worship.
And then there are the two protagonists, seemingly striking in their opposition, the calculating, scheming and grotesque Dionysus of Matt Maltby, and Roland Singer-Kingsmith’s tragic Pentheus, whose decline from a strong ruler to a manic Bacchant is expertly explored. In actuality, what we realize is that the two characters are not that different, and both suffer a loneliness and isolation that constitutes a major element of the play.
The performance in the Hertford bop cellar will apparently feature sound effects, lighting and smoke to emphasise the horror elements of the story, but these seem somewhat unnecessary. The joy, and indeed horror, of this production of The Bacchae is in its simplicity, as the audience is taken on an intense and terrifying journey, perhaps, just maybe, something akin to the most extreme of Bacchic frenzies.
*****
