Bacchae review, National Theatre – Headspinningly smart and hugely entertaining

Nima Taleghani’s debut production sketches this dark, heightened world with wit and invention

Clare Perkins (Vida) in ‘Bacchae’ at the National Theatre (Marc Brenner)

According to ancient myth, the fearsome bacchae were prone to turning their victims inside out and scattering their entrails over Greek mountain sides. And Heartstopper actor Nima Taleghani has done something similar to Euripides’s classic here. In his debut play, he inverts the rakish god Dionysos into a refugee searching for belonging, makes the tyrannical ruler Pentheus a lovable crossdresser, and softens the rampaging bacchae into likeable feminist vigilantes who address the audiences as “b****es”. It’s a headspinningly smart, visually spectacular, and hugely entertaining opening move from new National Theatre artistic director Indhu Rubasingham.

As bacchic den mother Vida, a winningly frank Clare Perkins gives us an intro to this world: “Basically, we just topple dickhead dictators and provide liberation,” she explains, before wittily reining in vicious sidekick Serene (Melanie Joyce-Bermudez), who’d rather be embedding her French-tipped fingernails in someone’s cranium.

Under Vida’s leadership, these women roam about toppling unjust regimes and evangelising about the transformative powers of wine and sex: it’s all very Summer of Love meets #MeToo. Then their god Dionysos – a gold-drenched, fantastically charismatic Ukweli Roach – ropes them into a cause of his own. He believes his aunt Agave (Sharon Small) stopped him from taking his rightful place among the gods (because of snobbery about his demigod status), and so he’s bent on revenge against her and her son, Theban ruler Pentheus (James McArdle). Dionysos kidnaps Agave, makes her drunk with bacchic lusts, and uses her as bait to topple this tyrannical ruler.

Taleghani’s approach here is to turn Thebes into a kind of stand-in for oppressive states everywhere. Like Afghanistan under the Taliban, women are banned from laughing in public. Like the UK, protest groups are liable to be declared terrorist organisations.

Rubasingham sketches this dark, heightened world with wit and invention. The Olivier Theatre is the NT’s biggest space, and famously hasn’t always succeeded in finding shows to fill it – big splashy musicals aside. But her staging of the Bacchae really makes it feel like the Greek amphitheatre it was originally designed to resemble. It’s full of dream-like pageantry, with its chorus of women writhing like tormented souls in Kate Prince’s choreography, then stepping out of their angular Greek vase poses to directly appeal to a rapt audience. In a hilarious riff on the Greek dramatic tradition that violence must take place off stage, the chorus describes Agave devouring an innocent messenger with their faces pressed up against the fourth wall in horror, like they’re watching a lion devour a zookeeper through glass.

There’s also a thorough excavation of this story’s queerness – and not just through kinky sex jokes (although there are plenty). When Pentheus dresses up as a woman to infiltrate the bacchae, it’s meant to be humiliating – but here, it’s liberating, with designer Robert Jones creating a heartstoppingly beautiful scene of this softened tyrant sitting, sequinned, on a vast golden pine branch, in love with a gentler vision of himself.

Still, for all his play’s delicious bloodthirstiness and queer excess, Taleghani also explores the pressures within protest movements with surprising subtlety. Vida’s determination to codify and moderate the bacchae’s aims ends with her losing most of her followers. The bacchae represent the dangers of becoming so high on righteousness that you forget who you’re actually tearing apart. And Pentheus becomes symbolic of all the complacent liberal-minded types who are willing to accept outsiders, but not at the cost of any of their own personal comfort.

After all the intricacy that’s gone before, the Bacchae’s metatheatrical ending lands swiftly and slightly unsatisfyingly. Dionysos might be the god of theatre, but this isn’t really a story about the magic of live performance. Still, it’s hard to begrudge this lovable production a small moment of self-indulgence. This is full-bodied theatre, rich with invention, intriguing themes and visual sumptuousness. Drink deep and fall under its spell.

On at the National Theatre until 1 November; tickets here