Bacchai, NT Olivier Theatre, London

Savage and bloody ecstasy

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Greg Hicks must be accounted one of God's – or should that be the gods'? – gifts to Greek tragedy. A glory-covered veteran of Peter Hall's productions of the Oresteia, the Oedipus plays and Tantalus, he was equally compelling as the Furies-hounded, wife-murdering aristo in TS Eliot's Aeschylean update, The Family Reunion. Now, the actor is reunited with Hall, virtuosically tackling a trio of roles in the director's stirring Olivier Theatre revival of Euripides' Bacchai.

Hicks has a long, wiry, white body that becomes a serpentine musical instrument when he speaks. His voice boasts a commanding resonance that irradiates the underlying patterns in the verse but can also subvert formality with its hints of campy flounce and shrug. Such a combination of talents makes him a natural for the kind of mask-work that Hall demands in his productions of Greek tragedy. With naturalistic facial expression an impossibility, Hicks's ambiguous physical expressiveness and vocal resource become enormous assets.

This is a production intent on highlighting the theatrical reflexiveness of Bacchai, a tragedy precipitated through a grotesque travesty of comedy by Dionysus, the god of wine, madness – and drama. Colin Teevan's canny translation expands on this aspect of the play, opening with an interpolated nod to Peter Brook's definition of theatre: "An empty space and all of you, and me." An unmasked Hicks intones this line standing, with the house lights up, at the centre of Alison Chitty's mighty wooden disc of a stage. Then the actor dons the golden, horned mask of Dionysus, a deity devoted, he tells us, to "the transformation from the humdrum/ To the wild abandon of the play." There's an implicit parallel here with the malign magic that he has worked on the women of Thebes, driving them to a frenzied celebration of his rites in the mountains in revenge for the royal family's denial of his godhead.

Then, in a spine-tingling coup, the Dionysus mask is peeled off to reveal the false-face human mask he assumes to wreak havoc in the locality. Hicks brings a brilliantly insinuating mix of the virile and the effeminate to the part, coming over like a cross between a stage director and a gentleman's outfitter, as he puts a disastrous spell on the priggish Pentheus, prompting him to put on a frock and head off to the mountains to spy on the women's rites.

Excelling also as the blind seer Teiresias and as the chauffeur who catches the audience by the throat with his report of the Bacchic carnage that ensues, Hicks is not the only member of the cast to diversify. William Houston is superb, too, in a heart-rending double that sees him impersonate both Pentheus and (all the better for the haunting restraint of the performance) his stricken mother, Agave, who awakes from her savage, divinely fomented delusion to perceive that the bloody head she carries like a trophy is that not of a lion, but of her own son.

Harrison Birtwistle's score of unnerving drum beats and mocking brass sets the pace for a production in which Dionysus rubs in his triumph by staging a personal reappearance from under his victim's shroud. And, at the close, completing the theatrical metaphor, the choruses of red-cloaked Bacchanalian followers and visored totalitarian henchmen doff their masks as another illusion comes to an end. With Richard Eyre's excellent Cottesloe production of Vincent in Brixton also in the repertoire, the National Theatre is currently presenting impressive work by its two surviving former artistic directors. It is heartening to see the importance of continuity so eloquently illustrated.

To 12 June (020-7452 3000)