We’re rehearsing Act 2. Scene 2. That’s the bit where the Messenger staggers on stage, meets The Bacchae and tells the death of Pentheus in poetic and horrific detail. Euripides paints us a word picture, because the ancient producers of tragedies couldn’t or wouldn’t have staged this kind of violence. The audience gets the CGI detail and implied PTSD second hand.
Today, the goal in stage and screen violence is artistic verisimilitude - “here’s what a battle scene really looks like,” “this is what a gunshot wound looks like as it’s being made" - watch out for those 3D blood spatters. Think, for example, of the recent staging of Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse in London.
The onstage disemboweling at the end of the play was truly impressive stage craft (and made quite a mess for the crew to clean up every night).
Way back in 1968, I saw Patrick Stewart as Cornwall, and Ben Kingsley as Oswald in Trevor Nunn’s King Lear at Stratford. Unfortunately, all that I remember from the show was the controversially realistic blinding scene (and spending the remainder of the play peering between my fingers). It’s an open question whether the technical achievement of realistic violence aids or thwarts dramatic catharsis.
We’ll have plenty of red-colored corn syrup blood for The Bacchae recognition scene - when Agave comes in with Pentheus severed head (though probably not enhanced remainders from Jacobsen’s butcher for the rest of his dismembered body). But the bulk of the considerable violence in this play happens off stage and and we experience it through speeches.
We’re assuming The Bacchae wasn’t Euripides’ version of a modern slasher flick and that the violence serves a more profound vision. The original meaning of the play has obscured by the mists of time, but it’s becoming clearer that the violence of this play (and many other Greek tragedies) is essentially psychological. It reminds us of our precarious position. In earlier Greek drama, this is meant to evolve awe and respect of the gods. Euripides, however, leaves us deeply uneasy about the powers that be.
Whatever is in control (if, indeed anything really is) in this play, does not make itself easily understood. It’s not a flaw in the plot, it’s the theme of the play. This production is going with the play’s famous tag-line as it’s dramatic raison d’être: “Daemons take many forms and the gods perform unlooked for ends: what was anticipated has not come to be and in the unexpected, the god has found a way”.
Underlying and interwoven into all the speeches in the play is the dilemma of what to do with the unknowable. Like Pentheus, we can pretend it doesn’t exist. Or, we could try to manipulate it, like Kadmos. Or honor it, according to Teiresias’ advice. But in the end, whether it wears a benevolent face (“Happy are they that have a pure spirit - and, life-sanctified, should-initiated - join the mysteries of the god”) or a horrific one (“Dance Bacchae! And shout for joy at the misfortune of Pentheus, the death of the dragon’s offspring!”) we must admit our condition and find a way to cope with it.
This week’s big question has been how to best dramatize the disturbing text in Scene 2.2. As the Messenger, Michael Feakins has been experimenting with blocking and interactions with the Chorus to illustrate this. We knew the women were fearsome, but it took awhile to realize what made them so. It’s not that they threaten the Messenger, rather, as Dionysus' followers they are troublingly unknowable. What will they do? Teiresias says early in the play that when it comes to honoring Dionysus, it is the nature of the woman that determines her behavior. Are these women safe? The Theban maenads, sent mad by the god, were tragically unsafe. It is the very not-knowing, and imagining what might happen that creates the terror and tension in this scene.
The catharsis, as it turns out, is not vicariously experiencing Pentheus’ gruesome end, it is surviving the telling of it with the Messenger.
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