Ancient Greeks starting to look their age

THE BACCHAE, Royal Exchange, Manchester

THEATRES do this sort of thing from time to time to keep them on what they see as the straight and narrow.

Too much modernism? Losing sight of traditional values? Go back to basics with the ancient Greeks — in this case, Euripides’s almost 2,500-year-old tragedy about hubris, power and gods with a lousy attitude.

Thebes’ ruler Pentheus tries to stamp out worship of his half-god, half-mortal, half-brother Dionysus so the latter takes umbrage, humiliates Pentheus then sees to it that his own mother and his aunts rip him literally limb from limb, which in my book amounts to a tough family.

In the past few years the play has been revived and remodelled in any number of ways, making the characters modern, more relevant and at least interesting to your average non-ancient Greek. The play is actually about Greece’s gradual adoption of other cultures and religions. Many modern parallels there, you might think.

So the most startling thing about this rather tedious, unbroken 105 minutes is that director Braham Murray decides to play it straight, with the whole robes, garlands and swooning chorus bit — not to mention a nice line in fake blood and a severed head.

Admittedly the middle 45 minutes — the bit with the anger and retribution — is quite excitingly done, but with every Greek tragedy comes a dollop of philosophy, a few pages of explanatory text, some geography, some history and more godly genealogy than most of us might care for. I must confess I found my attention wandering more than once — particularly in the slow, exposition-laden opening.

The actors have a particularly hard time with all this since few of them say very much and those who do are saddled with pages of monologue. Jotham Annan, as the young god, maintains a rather cruel dignity throughout, and Sam Alexander who, bearing in mind he comes on as the proud king, leaves the stage dressed as a girl, and returns minus his torso, doesn’t.