“You don’t know what your life is, nor what you are doing, nor who you are”, Dionysus tells Pentheus. This is one of the climaxes in The Bacchae, and the Classics student in me anticipates Pentheus’s hubristic response – “I am Pentheus, son of Echion and Agave.” But in this ‘Company of Wolves’, one-man adaptation, no response comes.
Ewan Downie performs the entirety of this Euripides tragedy in fifty minutes, embodying each and every character himself. His performance explores the key themes of the play in a nuanced, complex way — for example, reflecting Dionysus’s deceptive ability to change bodies and states by, in a matter of minutes, transforming himself into a charismatic and humorous Zeus, to a terrified Semele, and then a sinister, sadistic Dionysus. Additionally, his increasingly unhinged and uncontrolled characterisation, paired with Katharine Williams’s arresting light design, viscerally immerses the audience into Pentheus’s disorientation and delirium.
However, whilst the complicated, crazed emotion of the tragedy is certainly present, I don’t actually think it is very clear what was happening onstage. There were many moments that felt like they assumed background knowledge, for example the buzzing yellow light as Downie told the story of Semele—this moment becomes far more significant and interesting to any audience member who knows the context, despite it not being mentioned in this production, this is a reference to Zeus striking and killing her with a lightning bolt.
Additionally, Downie’s nuanced interpretation of each character he embodies creates compassion for typically unsympathetic characters – namely this is towards Dionysus, whose backstory of his abandonment by Zeus and Pentheus’s family allows unusual empathy for the capricious God. However, I feel like this entirely overlooks the play’s more interesting themes; we aren’t meant to sympathise with Dionysus, we are supposed to be terrified by him. Furthermore, the script entirely overlooks the role of femininity in ‘The Bacchae’ – the play is centered around a group of women abandoning their families and roles within Thebes, and by only having a single male actor, the production abandoned the captivating questions about the role of women in maintaining balance between chaos and order in society.
Ultimately, whilst the play captures a lot of the emotion of Euripides’ tragedy, I think it fails to make use of the complexity and astuteness of the text, which made for a slightly underwhelming experience.
Production image by Louis Mather on behalf of Company of Wolves