While the marketing for the National Theatre’s production of The Bacchae presents it as mawkish girl-power feminism, I assured my sceptical friend that there was simply no way that The Bacchae could be made woke. Euripides’s 2,430-year-old swan song is too alien and too ancient to be fitted into modern morality. The myth tells of King Pentheus’s determination to stamp out the all-female cult of Bacchus (aka Dionysus) and its ecstatic secret rituals. Pentheus recklessly defies the gods, and pays the price when Bacchus manipulates him into infiltrating the cult dressed as a woman. Pentheus’s own Bacchus-frenzied-mother, believing him a lion, rips him apart and parades his head as a trophy before coming to her senses in horrific realisation.
Alas, the opening night revealed that I had underestimated the honesty of the marketers and the ideological zeal of the modern playwright. The play has been completely rewritten into an unintentional self-parody of activist theatre. The figure of Dionysus is recast as a fabulously flamboyant refugee-rapper leading a collective of polyamorous, kink-positive, intersectional queer feminist activists recently classified as a terrorist organisation by the government. Pentheus becomes a foaming-at-the-mouth xenophobe obsessed with expelling immigrants and putting women in their place. Given that Dionysus is now a refugee hero, the responsibility for Pentheus’s horrific punishment is shifted toward Pentheus’s mother. Dionysus, conversely, almost befriends and forgives Pentheus. This turnaround is made plausible when it is revealed that Pentheus is a bit of a fabuloso himself — the cross-dressing element is now a repressed longing to wear his mother’s sparkling golden dresses. Sadly, Pentheus can’t restrain himself from a final hate-filled gammonish outburst, and the Greek tragedy consumes him as programmed.
Of course there’s only so much social justice that can be woven into the skeleton of a Greek myth, so most of the activism is just shovelled in without any pretence of narrative integration. Dionysus simply chooses to randomly lecture the audience, usually in song and dance, about a whole vista of “Rainy Fascism Island” pet peeves, from Somali doctors being denied equivalence of qualification, to the controversy over the use of lyrical bragging about violent crime in trials of drill rap artists, to mocking those pathetic Uncle Tom migrants who praise their host culture and try to assimilate.
It embraces metaphysical narcissism as a comprehensive artistic-political program
But what makes this production painful for a fan of the original isn’t so much the politics, as the systematic replacement of all potentially confusing and alien ideas with the content of last week’s The Guardian. Like all “relevant” and “accessible” theatre, the piece champions the principle that we should only see stories that are stories about us — that is to say, it embraces metaphysical narcissism as a comprehensive artistic-political program.
The “us” in question is not so much 2025 London as 2025 theatreland London. “Relevance” is taken to mean that the infinite possibilities of time and place must be collapsed into that one very specific monoculture. Actual 2025 London is the most socially conservative city in the country — authentic cultural diversification in action. Immigrants are largely not predisposed to seeing themselves represented by twerking intersectional feminists rapping their enthusiasm for “clit-licking”. Neither, one assumes, are the 41 per cent of young UK black men who admire Andrew Tate, or the 100 per cent of British Muslims who condemn homosexuality. The accessibility of The Bacchae is the accessibility of theatreland talking to theatreland about theatreland thoughts. Real immigrants and their descendents may not be following the inclusivity script but imaginary fetishised immigrants jolly well can be.
Our feisty imaginary immigrants are kind-hearted culture warriors bringing spicy food and spicy, progressive sex to pale, stale Blighty. They are the pure and unadulterated mouthpieces of theatreland’s own longings and values — John Lennon reincarnated in gyrating brown fabulousness to bring boomer dreams to backlash Britain.
While some might regret that everything that makes Euripides’ The Bacchae disturbing and otherworldly has been eviscerated, the unpleasant deed does afford an opportunity for reflection on the changing meaning of Bacchus.
Before being made relevant and accessible, Euripides’ Dionysius and Pentheus were both confusingly ambivalent characters. Euripides’ Pentheus supported the same ultra-patriarchal orderliness as Athenian citizens largely would — one assumes that the petty tyrants of Athenian households would not take kindly to their wives and daughters cavorting in reputedly orgiastic trances in the hills — but he pushes this with a dementedly aggressive and egoistic zeal in open defiance of the very god that Athenian theatre was established to honour. The patron god of theatre punishes the reckless boy-king and his similarly impious mother with an especially sadistic and humiliating death, and Euripides doesn’t downplay the horror:
“From being your royal and honoured daughter, the mother of a king, I’m now transformed— an abomination, something to fill all people’s hearts with horror, with disgust — the mother who slaughtered her only son, who tore him apart, ripping out the heart from the child who filled her own heart with joy — all to honour this god Dionysus.”
If there is a moral to the story it seems to be something like this: like it or not, you must honour the forces of wild mutability, and the specifically female space outside the remit of the state; if not given their due worship they will grow into a terrible all-consuming destruction. Or possibly it means something completely different — I don’t claim to understand the psyche of a people who felt compelled to gather every year to perform their newly-invented art of theatre as a way to honour one of their most important and psychically-present gods, and ended up awarding a play that seems to portray that god as a monster. What does Dionysus mean when he tells Pentheus “you are quite ignorant of why you live, what you do, and who you are”? What does it mean that the Bacchae turn out not to be indulging in orgies, but to be an “orderly arrangement” of women of all ages defined more by their intense love for Dionysus and their supernatural violence? And what of Pentheus suffering the same cruelty that the infant Dionysus suffered when he, in Orphic tradition, was ripped apart by the Titans? It’s a difficult and fascinating mystery because it presents a world that sits outside of our own Christian and post-Christian paradigm.
With the coming of Christianity, Bacchanalia went from terrifyingly vital to unambiguously evil. His prominent association with drunkenness, libidinism, animality, and loss of control inevitably plunged him into being the defining icon of pagan vice. More than any of his Olympian colleagues, Dionysus underwent an intense process of literal demonisation. In art, his bacchae became witches cavorting with monsters, and his aulos-playing satyrs eventually became the horned image of Satan himself.
Yet from another perspective Dionysus appears as a dim prefiguration of Christ. Like Dionysus in the Orphic tradition, Jesus suffers a cruel and unjust death, only to be divinely resurrected and remembered through ritual flesh-eating aimed at spirit-filled union with the deity. Like Dionysus, he is the long-haired bringer of holy wine and joyful festivity, striking in his association with female devotees. He is the son of God and a mortal woman, but is nevertheless fully divine. Like Euripides’s Bacchus, he warns of terrible consequences for those who do not recognise his divinity.
So perhaps it is not surprising that Christian societies produced one hell of Bacchanalian revival in the 1960s, not as pagan restoration but as a new, hybridised religion. Libidinal dancing, altered states of mind and free love become the order of the day, but are now tied to ancient Christian ideals. The liquefaction of roles and categories that was associated with Dionysian wine and theatre is today presented as the only humane alternative to the perpetuation of exploitative power relations. The National Theatre’s Pentheus almost attains redemption when he puts on a dress; for one brief scene, he becomes playful, joyful and empathic. Far from being its hellish opposite, boundary-dissolution is now the essence of the kingdom of heaven and a loving heart.
While Bacchus-Christ has no time for being a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom, and no disposition for the obedient worship of a father figure, he would not disagree with his Jewish predecessor about the centrality of love. The Bacchrist wants us to have universal compassion, and possibly even to love our enemies. He just wants us to know we are actually even more loving when we get twerky and sexy and drunk and high. By ceasing to make war on our own transgressive shadow self we become more loving and accepting of others.
The Christian side of the Bacchristian piety in the National Theatre’s The Bacchae surely lies behind the creation of a whole new character, Bubull. His arc takes him from violent monster to heart-filled peacenik, gruntingly preaching that liberation comes through forgiveness of our enemies and release from the cycle of violence and vengeance. Nothing to do with Euripides and everything to do with Christian teachings on forgiveness, marauding like a holy phantom in the loose clothing of therapeutic self-help.
Even more than gender-bending, the concept of the foreigner receives special sacralising attention in Bacchristianity. Although a historian would identify Dionysus as being as Greek as any other Olympian, the Greeks really didn’t want to think of him this way, but rather as a proper effeminate Other from Asia Minor. To the 1960s mind, it is an irresistible opportunity to infuse Christian ethics: “I was a stranger, and ye took me in… inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” — i.e. what we do for the poor, the oppressed, the stranger, we do for God Himself. But since this God was killed in the metaphysical steps preceding Bacchristianity, the stranger and the oppressed have taken on some of the properties of God themselves. Once simply objects of charity, the oppressed and the stranger have inherited some of the deceased god’s holiness — unimpeachable and authoritative to such an extent that the insulting of an oppressed group is now a blasphemy so uniquely terrible that the relevant curse-words, like the name of God, cannot even be written.
The National Theatre’s Dionysus is a stranger because white Britons need to be taught a gospel lesson, but the Greeks’ Dionysus was a stranger because his presence brought confusion and ambiguity, attributes incompatible with an Important Political Message.
It expresses all the correct opinions of the western arts scene monoculture
Indeed, as an expression of conventional and predictable Bacchristian piety and hopes, The Bacchae is immaculate. It never deviates from the ideological script by a single letter. It expresses all the correct opinions of the western arts scene monoculture. It utterly excludes any troubling thought or concept from other times, places and peoples — a realm of fearful chaos that could potentially lead to the thinking of thoughts reactionary and harmful. Everything is so accessibilised — each Bacchae is given a simple one-dimensional pantomime personality, Snow White and the Seven Bacchae style, on which to hang simple accessible jokes — that even the most challenged theatrelander will know exactly what to think and feel at every moment. Assuming no actual unwesternised immigrants have sneaked into the theatre, the audience has already seen the same story rolled out over and over for the past 60 years. As an expression of boomer ideology’s total cultural hegemony, it is magnificent. The choreography, performances, set design and stage mechanics are all faultlessly executed. We can almost see a bodysnatched Euripides rise and animate before us, smoothly and slowly producing from between his pale undead lips a long and perfectly-formed rainbow-coloured turd, to universal joy and applause. The existence of this play as a centrepiece of the National Theatre, and an authentic expression of our present national culture, is high theatrical tragedy in itself.
