Bakkhai,
Almeida Theatre
London N1
3/5

Much hype has surrounded film star Ben Whishaw’s appearance in the Almeida Greeks season. with so much excitement, the Morning Star nearly didn’t get a ticket.

Nothing could live up to this anticipation, and for me, James Macdonald’s production of the Bakkhai does not do justice to Euripides’s self-consciously theatrical work.

Ancient, ritualistic drama, with tragic characters and ideas require creative, stylised performance styles and dialogue.

Even if the task is to re-pitch the Greeks to new young audiences, Anne Carson’s new version of the play is too colloquial and pedestrian, it contains too little poetry and too many contemporary turns of phrase to adequately represent a transcendent realm where the god Dionysus strides the stage, generates violent frenzy among his followers, causes kings to be torn apart by their ecstatic mothers.

Dionysus is the Other made flesh — to play him, an actor requires a huge, physical presence and a sublime voice. Greg Hicks in the role, a few years ago, managed this — his body and voice have a strange angularity, flexibility and athleticism, which made the idea of the divine Dionysus on stage powerfully plausible and hypnotic.

Technically, this is not an option available to Whishaw. His slight body and voice means he opts to play Dionysus as a sexually ambiguous, sly and capricious young hipster, which, if I found it unconvincing, does have some interesting consequences.

Rather than being terrified or mesmerised by him, we laugh at his manipulative cunning. If his Dionysus lacks intensity and scale, it works as a schemer and the gentler side of the god is also explored.

Whishaw also plays elderly seer, Tiresias and a messenger with competence.

The best aspect of this production is the captivating chorus of the eponymous Bacchic women. Their dialogue is delivered in unison in song, haunting, disruptive music and rhythm composed by Orlando Gough.

Their unaccompanied vocals and movement offer the only real attempt at ritual and Dionysiac inebriation in the production, which is welcome. There are also some enjoyable comedy moments in this production.

Macdonald, a prescient and interesting director is an aficionado of Sarah Kane’s work, and perhaps he intuits Kane’s dark sublimity in the Bakkhai, gesturing towards this in the emphasis upon blood-soaked characters at the climax and in bringing Pentheus’s dismembered corpse on stage — but the naturalistic performance style cannot arrive at or sustain the intensity and horror of Greek drama.

The production is at times thought-provoking and there are some good performances too, not least from Bertie Carvel and Kevin Harvey.

But, in the end, it is reductive. We should not bring great drama down to our domestic level. To put gods on the stage convincingly, we need to find a whole new level of theatrical representation.

Until September 19 2015. Box office (020) 7359-4404 www.almeida.co.uk