How on earth do we stage Greek tragedy today? Broadly speaking, there are three possible approaches: re-creation, updating and rewriting. All three have been tried at the National Theatre across 30 productions, starting with Philoctetes in 1964 and leading to Nima Taleghani’s new Bacchae. Having seen virtually all of these, and visited the excellent exhibition about them in the Olivier’s Wolfson Gallery, I should be able to decide which is the best method. Yet, in all honesty, I find the National’s approach to the Greeks a strange mixture of hit and myth.
Re-creating the past is, of course, impossible: as Edgar Allan Poe once remarked, reproducing an Attic tragedy for a modern audience is “the idea of a pedant and nothing beyond”. But, even if we are not living in Athens in the fifth century BC, we can adopt the staging techniques then used. The most zealous attempt to do so came from Peter Hall who, in his 1981 production of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, had an all-male cast entirely in masks. Masks were employed in ancient Athens because the occasion was a religious ritual. One actor played many roles and facial features had to be exaggerated in a vast space; what was once a practical necessity now seemed an artistic barrier. But that doesn’t invalidate the attempt to imaginatively recreate the past.
In his 1980 Berlin production of The Oresteia, the great German director Peter Stein made you feel, as you watched Clytemnestra standing over the bodies of her husband and his lover with a sword dripping blood, that you were tapping into a collective historical memory. The more common approach in the UK is to retain the text but update the setting and this has been tried, mostly with great success, at the National.
Katie Mitchell set Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis in a dilapidated, requisitioned mansion (2004) and his Women of Troy in the bleak offices of a war-scarred ferry terminal (2007). Polly Findlay’s Antigone (2012) began with the whirring sound of a helicopter; as everyone cheered the capture of an enemy of the state, one was reminded of the White House situation room during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. In Carrie Cracknell’s Medea (2014), our first sight of Helen McCrory’s stunning heroine was of a woman in singlet and dungarees emerging from a bathroom, cleaning her teeth. It is striking how often at the National it has been female directors, going back to Annie Castledine with Women of Troy in 1995, who have found the key to unlocking Greek tragedy.
But there is a third category of plays that are inspired by Greek tragedy – and here the results are decidedly mixed. The most ambitious was Edward Bond’s The Woman (1977), which used Greek myth to show the exiled Trojan women delivering from Athenian occupation the island on which they were shipwrecked. My memory is of a terrific play which put female realpolitik before male posturing as the key to physical survival. Less successful, in my estimation, were Kae Tempest’s Paradise (2021), which relocated Philoctetes to a modern refugee camp and regendered the leading roles, and Simon Stone’s Phaedra (2023), which was a muddled, scenically overblown attempt to show the classic protagonist as a charismatic politician in thrall to the son of her dead lover.
Which brings us to the present version of Bacchae, which demonstrates the virtues and vices of creating a new play out of an old myth. On the plus side, there is the way Taleghani individualises the chorus members and suggests that a reconciliation of state power and personal freedom is still a possibility. But the writing is often crude, Taleghani ticks off too many hot topics and, when it comes to dramatic storytelling, he is no match for Euripides. (To take just one example, Agave’s realisation that the decapitated head she is clutching is that of her son, Pentheus, seems anti-climactic after she has earlier, and noisily, dismembered his messenger.)
There is no doubting the exuberance of Indhu Rubasingham’s production but, looking at this work along with that of Tempest and Stone, I find myself wishing that instead of rewriting the Greeks – or indeed any past masterpieces – we could grapple with them in all their baffling, multiayered complexity.