Review: The Bacchae

Alex McCooeye

Sons and Songs of God
by Nanette Soucy

There is no better known tale in the Western world. A man is born, supposedly the son of a God. His arrival flanked with revellers and worshippers brings forth a wave of religious fervor, song, and adulation to the city that threatens its ruler and to spread chaos, blood, and barbarism throughout the land. The God-Man is persecuted, his following ruthlessly suppressed. The story ends with the sacrifice of a son and the ultimate suffering of his mother.

Taking a page from the Coen brothers playbook, Scapegoat Carnivale’s presentation of Euripides’s final work, The Bacchae, is set in a nostalgic era of the deep south of the United States remembered most fondly for its music. Venturing a few decades past O Brother Where Art Thou’s Blues roots, we find ourselves in the early 19th century in the decades preceding the American Civil War, when expansion into the promised land of the American West unleashed a wave of missionaries and their choruses of call-and-answer gospel choirs in a religious revival that could be thought of as the seeds of the Evangelical America we know today. The similarities between the figure of Dionysus and that of Christ, the former myth, according to scholars, and likely a source of the latter, makes the setting all the more appropriate.

Interview: Alison Darcy on Scapegoat Carnivale's The Bacchae

intense, dramatic, harsh and notoriously hard to stage

Alison Darcy is a living legacy. She has gone far beyond being the daughter of directors Maurice Podbrey (Centaur founder) and Elsa Bolam (Geordie founder) to becoming one of the finest director/artistic director/actors in the country. Her company, Scapegoat Carnivale, scored huge with their production of Medea, and is once again tackling the Greeks with The Bacchae.

CHARPO: What is your role for this production?

DARCY: My role this time around is solely as producer. It is my first time stepping out of a Scapegoat production creatively. It's a super odd feeling for me. I haven't even been to the rehearsals yet.

CHARPO: The Greeks again...why?

DARCY: We're not done with them. There's too much good stuff there. Andreas and Joe [Shragge, co-translator and co-director for the production] felt compelled to do the script and eager to do another translation of Euripides because he was such a master of pure theatre. Also I think their idea to set it during the Great Awakening is inspired. And we had such a great reception to Medea, I think Montreal audiences are excited to see new interpretations of classics, especially ones not often done. The Greeks are the originators of Western theatre, these are our fairy tales, the founding of the Judeo-Christian theology and our society. What better well to pull from? Maybe a trilogy could be in the making.

First-Person: Joseph Shragge on The Heretics of Bohemia

Dramaturgy of Disappointment

Failure in the Face of Comic Expectations

by Joseph Shragge

"Humor, I suppose, consecrates nonexistence." Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: 

a new view of dramatic form

The moment genre is invoked, expectations emerge. The process of dramaturgy for our upcoming play The Heretics of Bohemia consistently raised the question, “what is this?” Knowing the piece was a comedy didn’t help specify what kind of comedy it was. For a period I thought of it as a turn on festive or Saturnalian comedy, outlined by the critic C.L. Barber as, “Release expressed by making the whole experience of the play that of a revel.” This genre raises the expectations that social hierarchies will invert, and that all the energy put into maintaining inhibitions will be released into misrule, play, and a flight from the self. Trying to achieve the glorious freedom of this idyllic vision of life, I buckled. Trying to revise the text with the comic expectation of enjoyment met with unhappy results. When a character experienced a loss of self, it was unsettling; excesses and intemperance, produced guilt and dread. Instead of liberation, more energy was needed to maintain the exact inhibitions that the genre promised to allay.