When Gods Are ‘Wanton Boys’

EDINBURGH, Scotland — “What does it mean to be divine?” asks Cadmus, patriarch of a family shattered by religious fervor, and ex-king of a state destroyed by godliness. The answers presented in Euripides’s last tragedy, written centuries before humanity came up with the concept of a deity characterized by benevolence and all-encompassing love, are at best disconcerting, at worst terrible.The National Theatre of Scotland’s new version of “The Bacchae” opens with a sequence as ambiguous as it is beautiful. A human figure, hanged by its feet, drops from above. Its back is to the audience. In murky light, it is as featureless and sexless as an ancient corpse disinterred. As it touches the stage-floor the light goes bright. With fishy sinuousness the back arches and the face lifts toward us. Muddiness turns to brilliance. Glossy dark hair, glittering eye shadow, smooth shoulders: For a moment, it’s obvious this is a woman. Then the figure flips onto its feet, unmistakably male. This is Dionysus.Sexual indeterminacy and the way connotations of torture and high glamor clash in his first appearance are not the most disconcerting things about this god. More frightening still is his frivolity. Alan Cumming, who plays him, swaggers in a gold lamé kilt and watches the humans degenerate with a jeering grin. Mr. Cumming is best-known for camp comedy, and especially for his performance as the Master of Cermonies in “Cabaret,” but his teasing in this role is differently nuanced. His big teeth, permanently on show in a smile as fixed as an ancient tragic mask, are like those of Red Riding Hood’s wolf-grandmother — all the better to bite you with.He is, though, still a showman. In this fresh but faithful new version of the play, written by David Greig from a translation by Ian Ruffell, and directed by John Tiffany, the chorus is a chorus-line. The eponymous Bacchae, Dionysus’s female devotees, are all rich-voiced, all dressed in gorgeously flounced or sequinned floor-length poppy-red gowns, and all black. This backup group of soul sisters comments on and abets the destruction of the community in a series of rousing gospel hymns and neat Motown-style song-and-dance routines.This is all deliciously enjoyable. The production, designed by Miriam Buether, looks beautiful. In an elegant space, all swooping curves, its whiteness drenched in honey-colored light, the women, disposed over two levels (there’s a rail halfway up each wall) throw twisted shapes as they freeze to attend the dialogues. A stream of wine or blood purls across the floor. Cadmus and Tiresias, in spats and flower-wreathed tophats, execute a soft-shoe shuffle (the nearest such oldies can get to Dionysiac frenzy). After another witty visual gag (members of the chorus carried on stiff-limbed as dress-makers’ dummies), Pentheus, the king determined to uphold order and rationality, is coaxed out of his rigid dignity and into a tiara, while Mr. Cumming’s Dionysus leers and the maenads titter.The stress here is on sex. Pentheus, the repressor, begins to talk smuttily as he falls under the influence of the insinuating, seductive god. Mr. Cumming gives a salacious turn to lines that never before sounded so suggestive. This is reductive — the human capacity for wildness and violence that Euripides wrote about is larger and more ominous than any simple erotic urge — but as theatrical performance it works, and it gets its laughs.But the fun here is not of the harmless variety. When Dionysus is imprisoned and brings down the palace, that rail — so handy for posing on — abruptly reveals its true purpose. Gas jets transform the backdrop into a wall of real fire: the heat, even from the dress circle, is scorching. It’s over in a moment, but it’s a hint that what’s going on here is dangerous. The playfulness, the winks and songs, are manifestations not of innocent merriment but of heartlessness.Two-thirds of the way through the play Dionysus, previously onstage almost throughout, absents himself, leading the hapless Pentheus, now disguised as a woman, offstage and up Mount Cytharion to spy on the women’s bacchic revels. The atrocity perpetrated there is finely narrated by one of the chorus, and then enters Pentheus’s mother, Agave, carrying her son’s torn-off head. It’s one of the most horrifying moments in the dramatic cannon, and Paola Dionisotti, as Agave, rises to it with a performance of exquisitely controlled intensity. This is fine, old-school tragic acting, and it makes Mr. Cumming’s prancing Dionysus seem jarringly vain and lightweight in retrospect.But this is the nub of what this vital and inventive version of Euripides’s great parable is telling us. The gods are “wanton boys,” morally no better than we are. “But that’s so human,” cries Cadmus, appalled, when Dionysus explains his motives for destruction. Quite so.Ms. Hughes-Hallett is the author of “Heroes: A History of Hero-Worship” (Knopf/Perennial). She last wrote for these pages on Giuseppe Garibaldi.

When Gods Are ‘Wanton Boys’

When Gods Are ‘Wanton Boys’

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