Bombing in Baghdad

The Abbey has taken a Greek classic and used it as an allegory for Iraq: the result is incoherent politics and bad drama, writes Colin Murphy It says something about the travails of the national theatre that The Bacchae of Baghdad, the new production by Conall Morrison, is not the worst Abbey play in recent memory. In attempting to set The Bacchae, by 5th century Greek playwright Euripides, in contemporary Baghdad, Morrison renders the play trite and the action incoherent.
Anybody who has ever seen bad Greek drama will know what to expect: a nubile female chorus chanting and writhing, obscure and overextended monologues, a funny old blind woman, endless screeching.
It is easy to see why the The Bacchae might provoke contemporary interest. The play is about something of a clash of civilisations, between the rationalist, secular Greek society of Thebes and a mystical faith brought to Thebes from the East.
The god Dionysus arrives from Asia to convert Greece to a new faith; Pentheus, king of Thebes, attempts to have Dionysus and his followers, the Bacchae, crushed. Dionysus propagates a mystical, all-consuming religion, rooted in uninhibited celebrations in the wilds where animals are slaughtered by his women followers' bare hands. Pentheus, a pragmatic but cold ruler, sees Dionysus and his faith as a threat to the city-state, and seeks to repress it.
Dionysus evades Pentheus, and then succeeds in luring Pentheus to observe a Bacchic rite. There, Dionysus has Pentheus seized by the frenzied women, who, in their ecstasy, believe him to be a wild animal for slaughter, and tear him apart. The leading figure in his slaughter is Pentheus's own mother, Agave, who has attended the ritual for the first time and does not recognise her son, but returns to Thebes exultant, drenched in his blood, with his head on a stick. So not only is Pentheus punished for his apostasy, but Agave is viciously punished too.
This is rich, but difficult, material for a politically-minded exploration. The text is layered with issues of obvious contemporary resonance: the proslytising of a radicalised religion, the extreme devotion of its adherents, the confused and contradictory attempts of a secular administration to repress it.
These allusions to contemporary events are abstract and unwieldy, and the original play is morally ambiguous as to the fate of Pentheus and the justice of Dionysus's actions. Yet Conall Morrison has taken the play and set it firmly in a bombed-out Baghdad, with Pentheus as the head of the American military administration.
The allegory is at best strained, at worst hopelessly confused. When the chorus celebrates the coming of Dionysus, they thrash about the stage in a brief, destructive celebration, culminating with one of them breaking a McDonald's sign that hangs from a building. When Dionysus is arrested by Pentheus's officers, he is led onstage in an orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuit.
And what are we to make of Pentheus's apparent taste for dressing in women's clothes? This is the most idiosyncratic element of Euripides's play – in order to secrete Pentheus out of the city to watch the Bacchic ritual, Dionysus persuades him to dress as a woman, and Pentheus finds he rather likes it. In The Bacchae, this hints at repression in the society he governs and at the mystical, compulsive attraction that Dionysus exudes. But in The Bacchae of Baghdad, overwhelmed by the attempt to find a direct political parallel for the play, this simply becomes a nonsense.
The production could probably survive the clumsy setting if it was well staged. But the direction is either blandly predictable, or simply absent: the chorus chants, the actors declaim, and there is no sign of an interpretative intelligence behind the delivery of the verse, or of any desire to make these lines – as opposed to the overall concept – coherent and compelling.
Sabine Dargent's set looks like a pastiche of a bombed Middle Eastern city: a brightly-painted Minaret hovers in the background, a scaffolding is strewn with a mixture of neon-type shop signs and Arab esoterica, the facade of a ruined Persian-style building sits in the middle – none of it looks credible.
The production is partially rescued by some strong performances, by the quality of Euripides's play and by some of the writing in this adaptation, by Conall Morrison himself. Occasional lines and verses strike home with a simple, vivid power, but the script generally is cloaked in a fog of choral or declamatory incantation, and it's difficult to tell whether it's any good.
Of the actors, Andrea Irvine gives the most compelling performance of the piece; her Agave is hysterical, but appropriately so, and the moment when she awakens from her entranced state to find she is carrying her son's head on a stick is horrifying. Ruth Negga does well with bland material as a the most prominent of the cheerleader-like chorus. Christopher Simpson's Dionysus is relentlessly malevolent, but at least  convincingly so. Robert O'Mahoney has an unhappy outing as Pentheus, comfortable neither with his American drawl nor with the interpretation of the piece, and the play suffers badly for this lack of any convincing presence at its political heart.
For an opening night, the audience reaction as a whole was listless, though it was enthusiastic in parts. Anyone who hasn't previously seen a host of generic attempts at Greek drama may well be won over by the vitality of the play and the undeniable energy in the production: the leads declaim with fervour, the chorus chants with abandon and whirls like dervishes, there is much blood and strident music. There is extraordinary force in Greek drama, and as Agave first celebrates, and then laments, her murder of her son, some of that force is tapped: true, immense horror, visited on her apparently at the whim of the gods, in punishment perhaps for her son's hubris, perhaps for her own abandon in joining in the Bacchic rite. That comparable horror must exist in Iraq now is undeniable; but Morrison's apparent attempt to illustrate it via The Bacchae results only in cheapening it.
∏More The Bacchae of Baghdad at the Abbey theatre, Dublin until 15 April. Adapted by Conall Morrison from The Bacchae by Euripides. 01 878 7222, www.abbey-theatre.ie. Irish Times correspondent Lara Marlowe will give a pre-show talk at the Abbey Theatre on Friday 24 March, entitled ‘Being in Baghdad' (6.30 pm, free)