1 Kemi Atanda Ilori, “Soyinka’s Bacchae of Communion” – A Review of the Performance of Wole Soyinka’s “The Bacchae of Euripides”

SOYINKA’S BACCHAE OF COMMUNION A REVIEW OF THE PERFORMANCE OF SOYINKA’S THE BACCHAE OF EURIPIDES

Kemi Atanda Ilori School of Performance & Cultural Industries

University of Leeds LEEDS

(1st version, February 1990, and published in The African Guardian on 3rd March, 1990) (Revised March 2013. Copyright 2013)

Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides was performed at the Workshop Theatre,

University of Leeds from 6th to 10th February, 1990. The performance was directed by Amanda Price, involving a cast of nineteen actors and actresses, and a crew including Ruth Jackson and Chris Jowett for lighting and set, respectively. The Bacchae is one of Wole Soyinka’s two adaptations of European dramatic materials. The other being Opera Wonyosi, after John Gay’s and Bertolt Brecht’s Beggars’ Opera.

In both materials, Soyinka’s central concern seems to be to chisel the European landscape of both materials into a recognizable African scene. For this, he opts for a two-edged blade in his fine and extensive blending of the English language with the parlance of his African (Yoruba) background, resonant with chirpy proverbs and idioms. The other edge of his razor is his reconstructive theatrical form which is a model of communal ritual and social life, frilled with the characters and social incidents excerpted from nearly always actual socio-political happenings in certain African nation-states. The rough edge of the adaptations is reserved, as is well-known of Soyinka, for hide-bound political cliques and the unimaginable corruption (of values) that sustains them. The theatre in both adaptations is about such cliques anywhere in Africa. That is just one point. To add to that, I also like to think that it is in The Bacchae that one meets with deep

satisfaction the subtleties that a richly endowed playwright can bring to bear on the subject of hide-bound political systems. Soyinka’s craft consists in unmasking the inner layers of the human reality such systems exploit, from a deeply psychological and metaphysical point of view. The Bacchae is, on this point, one of Soyinka’s best moments in dramatic

technique and, painfully, it seems to illustrate as well, and at least in one instance at the very conclusion of his play, how Soyinka’s adorable sophistication sometimes needles some of us to ask why he engages his exultant form to also blunt his radical social stance. The production of The Bacchae at Leeds seems to me to accentuate this point fairly well.

The incidents of The Bacchae occur in Thebes, back in ancient Greece. Pentheus, the

king, is up in arms against a new creed. He perceives in the creed – of Dionysius – nothing more than the yeast to ferment rebellion amongst the slave population in his kingdom, as well as being the winepress for distilling social differences into nothing more than a common brew that evokes classless fraternity. Pentheus calculates that the ultimate aim of the new creed and its avatar is to install – if not a new regime – at least a new socio-political apparatus, highly indifferent and hostile to the established hierarchy. So Pentheus must stamp out this creed before it engulfs the whole of his kingdom. However, he appears to have embarked on such a rout rather late. His security establishment and reportage fail to match the pace, cunning and paternalism of Dionysius whose credo had become the cause of not only the slave classes but also of certain tendentious, excitable and irascible members of the upper crust, particularly, the State Seer (blind Tiresias -

2 Kemi Atanda Ilori, “Soyinka’s Bacchae of Communion” – A Review of the Performance of Wole Soyinka’s “The Bacchae of Euripides”

Youcef Selmane), Pentheus’s grandfather (Kadmos - Osy Okagbue), the royal mother (Agave – Shefali Roy) and a cadre of her royal sisters. These state functionaries, who had always made a business of occupying their exalted chairs in trust for the public, had a chance in Dionysius to be heroic and selfless for once in their lives. Excited by the cunning and delusions of Dionysius, they swept to the mountains to hug and embrace the common kind – the deprived and the abandoned – and, thereby, achieve a level of social symmetry outside of all class constraints. Agave and her sisters, especially, tasted what it meant to live ordinary lives outside the privileges and security of court. The crudeness of such a life, its raw deals, its sombre banalities, and its profound triteness, however, only drove the royal clan literally mad. They now experience what it has always meant: life at the periphery of the social order that they have created is a contagious mania. And so maniacal did they become that when their brash sire, Pentheus (Ken Darmanin), who had lost his wits in an irrational but daring encounter with Dionysius (Matthew Wooton), happened on their bacchanal orgies, Agave (Pentheus’s mother) was the first to pounce upon him. The royal pack soon flayed Pentheus and bounded back to the city with a triumphant trophy, the skull of a mountain-lion. It was Kadmos and Tiresias, at the close of play, who restored the bacchantes to their senses, when, as we might say, they were “psyched out” and made to recognise that their trophy was indeed the noggin of Pentheus! Ms Price’s production was a most exciting and courageous one. Though at moments we seemed to be entranced in a late night scare, it was on the whole a racy and fascinating tragedy. Its striking elements were ritual images sourced in the puffs of incense, sensuous blend of colours and imaginative fineries and fripperies. The verbal duels between Dionysius and Pentheus sounded more like ritual chants, and every encounter between Pentheus and Tiresias seemed to pitch the elegance of a political orator against the rustic craft of a priestly agent provocateur. A similar rustic grandeur is noticeable in the coarse tonality of the Shepherd (Steve Ingham) and the shrill rabble-rousing tongue of the Slave Leader (Sam Kasule). Sandwiched into all of this dialogue was the horror of mob action and dementia, particularly, in the gibberish poetry from raving bacchantes. The clash of values beneath the ensuing ritual of communion was well vented in the clatter of murderous sabres of officialdom as borne by Pentheus and his aide (Paul Lavin). This was a performance that deeply heightened our misgivings for mob rule, religious fanaticism, as much as deepening our hatred for a kind of nationalism espoused by demagogues, such as Pentheus, for whom law and order meant simply the rights of the political actor above the rights of the citizen. However, the complexities of Soyinka’s political stance, mediated by compound mythic motifs, ensure that neither the freedoms-curtailing carriage of Mr Pentheus, nor the demented ideology of the bacchantes, nor the painful anguish of the slaves completely persuade us to choose one above the other. They all seem to be aberrations from which we must shrink if our concept of normalcy or a fair and equal society must prevail. At the end, what seemed to have been celebrated was rather our modern and cannibal craving for the exotica and the unordinary, that spectrum of delusional and makeshift creeds and social policies which, only in the short run, tend to address the various ills of our social system. Perhaps, for this reason, Ms Price’s Pentheus was a shattering sight who rammed forceful speeches, punctuated with “manacles” and “chains”, into his audience and punched his way through the corridors of power with the iron fists of public order. Ostensibly, he was defending the territorial integrity of his nation, and dealing with characters subverting

3 Kemi Atanda Ilori, “Soyinka’s Bacchae of Communion” – A Review of the Performance of Wole Soyinka’s “The Bacchae of Euripides”

national security. It was his national duty to put down the slaves’ rebellion, destroy the enslaving cult of Dionysius, and restore the nation’s esteem by enabling members of the upper crust, who had fallen for the sophistry of Dionysius, to recover their dignity by forsaking the whole sham and charade in the new-fangled order. Against Pentheus’s agitated mind and military bravura, Dionysius was magnificent, spritely and warm, persuasive – even if rhetorical and full of sophistry. Asked what his followers benefitted from him, the answer was a speechless poise, the handsome gait, the cherubic smile and a hollow phrase to the effect that only those who belonged to his mysteries could tell. The Slave Leader made the contrast even more telling in the way he bellowed his lines to denote he was the bugle of rebellion. He exuded crude power and seemed to have a commanding view of the disaster at hand. He anticipated with eagerness that in the imminent ruin of the establishment, he stood the chance to find the livery of a new status. The one person that dominated the narrative without any strident voice or bellicose posturing was the Old Slave (Jeremy Davey). Burdened both with age and social constrictions, he became well the cameo for those specifics of timeless horror and suffering inherent in every system for the needy and the unprivileged. Ms Price followed Soyinka to conclude her production with a gust of wine from the noggin of Pentheus. Preposterous as it may seem, this is a token of communion to reconcile the warring factions, and sits well within the blind orgies of Dionysius. In that one festal dash, however, I conclude we come to a huge hole in Soyinka’s political theatre: Is it really probable to reconcile the slave and his master except the one forfeits his position – and the other takes his place? In agitprop fashion, is it not fairer to leave the play undermining those structures that partition people into slaves and masters? I guess neither Soyinka nor I have the whole answer. These are questions that will continue to exercise and frustrate, in equal measure, politicians and poets alike. But for the priest and the ideologue, it is always easy to devise a creed of brotherhood for all mankind. Is this the gist that Soyinka intends to convey in this Bacchae of communion?

4 Kemi Atanda Ilori, “Soyinka’s Bacchae of Communion” – A Review of the Performance of Wole Soyinka’s “The Bacchae of Euripides”