The Bacchae (also known as The Bacchantes) is a Greek tragedy by Euripides presenting human nature in terms of a duality, the rational and civilized versus the instinctive, symbolized by the god Dionysus. The original play tells the story of a city where the women, following Dionysus, the god of drunkenness, disinhibition, excess and mayhem, have all ‘upped stumps’ and retreated to a mountain side in a frenzy that becomes murderous. Orzek says that there’s very little of the original in Fraught Outfit’s production, apart from some key images and ideas. “Motifs, stories and figures are woven together to create a new order,” he explains. “There is the playing out of mutual destruction and desolation that we wanted to retain from the original, even though this is not a production of the play. In the original play of The Bacchae it opens when Dionysus has sent all the women mad and they’ve all left their homes, their families, their work. We’ve taken the figures of women on the mountain. The city setting is something that occurs in Greek tragedies, they often start with a state of crisis. With Oedipus for example, the city is suffering great plague. The women have gone – we’ve worked on a lateral interpretation of that. Our set isn’t a city; it’s a metaphor, the idea of a place becoming soulless, with its heart ripped out. The stage becomes void except for acts of divine power. And violence.”
Much of what audiences will see on stage at Theatre Works comes from collaboration with the young cast, adolescent girls in theatre training at Saint Martin’s Youth Theatre. Orzek reckons keeping up with their energy has been a challenge in itself. “The collaboration has been amazing,” he continues. “A huge part of the material comes out of the girls’ responses to it, both in the performance sense and in their physical and emotional responses. They’re an intellectual, intelligent bunch, so articulate, and it’s been exciting keeping up with their wonderful offers.. One challenge has been matching the amount of joy and vivacity these young women naturally have. They’re all at school, and fortunately we’ve had a longish time in development, so there’s been time to do a bunch of work – as an ensemble they have a lot of autonomy. There’s a real sense of collaboration and dialogue.”
We ask Orzek about the structure of the piece. Does the play involve a narrative? “It’s not a story with characters or with a beginning middle and end,” he answers. “It coheres in terms of watching a group we feel we know mutate and transform into something different before our eyes. Dionysus represents breaking down borders, mutation, hallucination, violence, and that’s the track we follow as audience.”
There’s some danger in portraying young women as crazy or hysterical, diagnoses that have been used to oppress women from time immemorial. Orzek elaborates. “Our interpretation of play didn’t fall into clichés of crazy women. We spoke to ideas the girls fed back to us. We negotiated the notion of ‘the hormonal or hysterical female’ – we talked about that a lot. When you tell people about the show there is this notion of teenage girls running around in hysterics screaming. We are playing against that. On a fundamental level, with an ensemble of teenage women, we looked at how to create a sense of terror and chaos, using their own experiences of hysteria with the design elements of the play coming together. We talked about trying to stage any kind of chaos. We’ve been integrating music and drama, we used the energy that is there and channeled it into more distilled psychotic images and sound to explore how these women are given divine power by the god which becomes emanation of quite the worst aspects of masculine violence. It’s a poisoned chalice. The other element that is central to the work is music – we wanted to create sense of Dionysus as also being the god of theatre who sustains that life force of music.”
In the original play the king of the city loses his life by daring to disguise himself and spy on the women. Orzek says Fraught Outfits’ version of The Bacchae offers no answers to any tricky questions about the male gaze, questions about who’s watching who. “I definitely don’t think there’s a polemic or a message,” he says. “We want audiences to be intrigued and excited. A lot of ideas are deeply embedded in the play – there is a relation to how the gaze works in daily life to a piece of theatre; in a lot of ways what you’re doing is voyeurism, wanting to watch the girls yet you’re ‘not allowed to’. This ensemble of young women, we gaze on them. These are aware and articulate girls who we watch and they watch us back. We’re confronted by a group of women who look back. There is a bleaker vision thrown back to us as a question as to how we construct young women. How we see women in terms of notions of violence, how we see insane women – this production does speak against the conventional images of mad women.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
