The gods are not mocked - review

One of the very first "serious" plays I remember snatches of was The Bacchae by Euripides performed at the round Greek theatre at what was then St Michael's Training College. Emy Bezzina was Dionysius while Marlene Schranz was Agave. I was at the time still a boy and I was mesmerised by this rather bloody melodrama which at its highest point features the Theban queen, Agave, her dress torn and bloodied, brandishing the severed head of her own son, Pentheus, under the delusion that it was a lion's.

Rather like baroque music that afforded minimal notation and can vary so much in mood and stance according to the whims of the performer, plays such as The Bacchae are open to interpretation. The version devised and directed by Lino Farrugia at the Couvre Porte was the version that was presented in the 2008 Edition of the International Classical Theatre Festival in Syracuse in mid-May and forms part of a pilot exercise called the Prisma Project which concerns itself with Integrated Relational Tourism.

This I suppose explains why the play was recited in English, reams and reams of Italian and a smidgeon of Maltese. I feel that the actors would have been much happier and more comfortable had the whole thing been in Maltese but there again it would never have been able to be performed in Syracuse would it?

Lino Farrugia's Bacchae was what I would call a rather jazzy souped-up version of the somewhat lugubrious play that I had seen all those years ago when still a nipper. The choruses are traditionally made up of groups of women swaying like anemones in a rock pool and dressed in black from head to toe. These Norn-like creatures narrate the action in a tuneless chant that one would associate with a group of very unfriendly ghosts. To top it all they take literally ages to enunciate a word, let alone a sentence! Mr Farrugia's chorus, on the other hand, were sung and danced in rather Lloyd Webber-like tunes by a band of chanteuses et danseuses straight out of Cabaret. The effect was "fast" in more than one sense.

What made the entire interpretation even more intriguing was that Mr Farrugia chose to portray Dionysius in his female attribute which is correct but unusual. Sean Buhagiar's high camp god wearing a Lurex miniskirt, a hairpiece and a bow was hysterically funny and yet done within the limits of good taste. Here was this typical "queen" whose arabesques, giggles and shrieks belied a very masculine hieratic god of immense and terrifying power. Dionysius's sex was always a trifle ambiguous and yet let there be no mistake that he was indeed very cruel and utterly vindictive to those homophobes like Pentheus who refused to allow his rites to be performed.

The essential message was the complete triumph of the sexually ambiguous, the unusual, the gay, the metrosexual over the boringly predictable heterosexual. Not an easy message to put forward by any means.

Mr Buhagiar carried the whole interpretation splendidly however, and here lies the crunch: because of the almost ribald nature of the homogenous interpretation, when the real tragedy did occur, a matricide of horrendous ferocity, the commensurate mood of pathos and sympathy was impossibly hard to evoke from an audience that had been quietly giggling at the music-hall antics of Dionysius and his band of ladies for the past hour and a half!

This is why I will not in 20 years' time be able to remember Lilian Pace Vassallo's otherwise impeccable performance as the crazed queen awaking from the divinely induced trance only to find that she has killed her own son whose head she had been carrying about like a trophy.

I will, however, always remember being riveted by Marlene Schranz's Agave all those years ago which proves that there is a limit to how far one can go with the gods... even today!