Is this Earth? Why does it smell so bad?

[alexsarll]

The Bacchae opens with Alan Cumming's arse descending from the heavens, upside down. And a very nice arse it is too, so fair enough. All these centuries on, Greek tragedies are a damned hard thing to get right; if you've never seen a cod-Shakespearean translation staged with dusty solemnity by an am dram shambles, then count yourself lucky. You need to balance the stage as the distant place in which the story unfolds, and the stage as the platform from which a speaker interacts with the audience. You need to balance the alien with the intimate, and only an incredibly rare director will be able to do both sides full justice. So maybe this production doesn't quite capture the strangeness and the terror - the music for the Bacchae's chants would need to be catchier for that, and just generally *more* - but it has the intimacy, the immediacy. And that's all down to Cumming, and the masterstroke of playing Dionysus as a pantomime character. Or two, perhaps - he's a hybrid of the Dame and the Principal Boy. I suppose he's the father of carnival, isn't he? So they're both his children, no wonder if we should think he resembles them both when really it's the other way around. And at times the staging catches glimpses of his power - you can feel the flames which burn Thebes, and the light when he appears in all his pomp is genuinely dazzling.
Translator David Greig has his tone about right (I particularly like his use of 'The Scream' rather than 'The Roarer' as one of the god's names). It's a long time since I read the play, but I don't recall it being quite so one-sided when I did - or rather, I knew that *I* was entirely on Dionysus' side, but I thought that was as much me as the text. Now...well, as Greig says, "There are still men who would control women in order to bolster their shaky sense of self. There are still men who are lost because they refuse to lose themselves in dance." He could add that some such men are also obsessed with male pride, and absolutely petrified of alcohol and 'corrupting influences' of the wider society, just like Pentheus. So for all that I liked Pentheus as the no-nonsense Scot unaware what a nonsense it is to resist Dionysus, I think the times and the translation would have been better served by dressing him as an imam.
My biggest problem with the play, though, is one I'm sure was in the text, but which I never really noticed, because when you're reading a play, you can...if not skim the bits you don't enjoy, then at least read them faster. Staged in front of you, there's no fast forward. Once Pentheus gets his come-uppance, once the others who slighted Dionysus and his mother get their just desserts, they don't half spend a while wailing about it. Look - I don't care. You were idiots. You had warnings, and still you stood against a god - and not just any god, but an incredibly cool god. Now you have been destroyed, as puny humans will be in such circumstances. And you were miserable sods, so I'm glad. Where's the tragedy? This isn't Shakespeare, or even Sophocles, where people are trapped impossibly between contradictory imperatives which must all be honoured. This is more like the end of The Wicker Man - ie, party time.

Speaking of puny humans, a marvellous quote I keep forgetting to post:
"At moments like this I hate being an unreconstructed human - an island of thinking jelly trapped in a bony carapace, endless miliseconds away from its lovers, forced to squeeze every meaning through a low-bandwidth speech channel. All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night."
- Charles Stross, Glasshouse. The speaker is a future human used to being able to swap bodies quicker than we'd swap outfits, confined by lunatics to a normal human body in a re-creation of the 1950-2050 Dark Age.

Comments

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you liked it - the people I went with didn't appreciate it at all and that annoyed me.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Seriously? I didn't pick up on that from your review, it must have been drowned out by your enthusiasm for it. But I'd really have thought that even if people weren't engaging with one of the founding classics of Western literature then they could revel in the eye candy, and vice versa.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

Oh, the boyfriend of the woman who got us tickets is a big fat theatre snob and said it was too stagey, and the woman who got us tickets claimed she wasn't expecting humour from Euripides.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you know where I was saying about those shitty translations? She was probably raised on those. Especially when you bear in mind that there'd normally have been a whole 'satyr play' of knob gags in the interval back in the day, but the monotheists didn't think those worth preserving...

As for 'stagey' - well, this stuff was never meant to be naturalistic! There was no fourth wall in Athens, dude - Hell, there weren't that many walls full stop.

[auxyeuxdargent.livejournal.com]

Wow, I haven't seen it yet and I don't think I am going to get chance more's the pity. I was fascinated by your writing about the comeuppance wailing because I REALLY remember that from reading it and thinking very much how odd and out of place it is in the entire piece. It is so odd becaus it is so unlike any other tragedy and so hard to work out why it is deemed a tragedy. x

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I don't know enough other Euripides to be sure (Hell, do any of us given how much is lost?) but I think he was maybe the father of the problem play - albeit in the opposite direction to the way we use the term of Shakespeare. One could take the sorrow as a sop to the audience, or to the conventions of the form (if they're not the same thing) - or one could think that maybe he wasn't fully a part of the new world himself, that he still felt a certain ambivalence about Dionysus' cult which a modern translator would naturally incline to omit.

[worldofagwu.livejournal.com]

i've only heard goob things abt this production - we had a classics prof ( & her cartoonist husband ) staying w/us the other week & she gave it the thumbs up

personally tho - i cannae stick alan cumming - he must be be my top 5 most irritating ppl on telly

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I was no fan of The High Life but since then I've generally liked his film work, not least in The Best Superhero Film Ever TM.

[worldofagwu.livejournal.com]

o - i didn't realise he was in ang lee's hulk...!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I liked that film a lot more than most people (see also: Daredevil), but - seriously?

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

These were the arguments I made! Except the thing about the knob gags, which I didn't know but slightly suspected.

[blanche-carte.livejournal.com]

Damn damn damn, not going to get to see this now, I don't think. But great to read a more interesting write-up than those in the papers.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Although I wonder if any of their critics might have had it in them to do something similar if they weren't worrying about editorial, the 'general audience' &c?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I used to have this great rant about the overemphasis on tragedy, taking in things like that, the loss of Homer's comic epic and Aristotle, culminating with the ending of Gaiman's Miracleman: The Golden Age. It was undermined not by any new discoveries in classical scholarship, but by my learning than if not for publishing fuck-ups, The Golden Age was to have been followed by The Silver Age and The Dark Age. I think that was the only time I've ever wanted to hit Neil Gaiman.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

Poor qua? I'm sorry, my reading comprehension skills are some what dry-buggered by the weekend.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, you're not missing much.