Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Daniel Fitzgerald, Nina Levy, Elliot Reeves, Aaron Kehoe, Kathryn McGurk, Nadia Amin Mohammed Noor, Natalie Bedkowska, Rachel Barry, Hannah McGowan, Imogen Allen, Katherine Collins, Tommy Williams, Nick Crosby, James O’ Neil, Tom Harrington.
The past is there not to be mocked or derided but to teach, guide and inform the future of its possible folly. By denying the very basic right to exist, to doubt their heritage, is to conjure up their wrath and those that sit in their corner.
If anyone in history understood this fatal flaw in Humanity, the ease in which kings, leaders of state and men easily dismiss those they don’t believe in, whether it was rival gods or women, then Euripides was perhaps the man who gleaned much from being observant and in his play The Bacchae, that dismissal of all, of refusing to understand both others and the duality in man comes back to haunt all.
Arguably only just as graphic in detail and the source of much unhappiness as Medea, it is a tough play to put together for the modern theatre goer and yet as is their raison d’etra, the Young Everyman Playhouse Theatre group pour everything into bringing this classic play to the stage.
In a play where there was much to take the future of YEP from, one of the most outstanding features is the way the group as whole embrace the female role in theatre. In a play set in the world of Gods and men and the duality of the restrained statesman and the beast like offerings of the singed idols, the role of women is vital. From the outstanding Bacchantes, each member of this small, rabid group of women who worship the ideal that Dionysus laid down before them through to realism of having a woman play the part of Tiresias, a truth of literature that never gets truly explored, Yep created something very special.
In Nina Levy’s performance as the blind soothsayer, not only was the truth of her soul captured but also that of the man condemned by Hera to live as a woman for angering her. This duality of Greek antiquity, the beast within the man is perhaps never more true in people such as Tiresias, the only difference being, that unlike Medea’s Jason or even King Leonidas, the beast is on the outside, Tiresias as a woman was more wise and understood the ways of kings and the woman who would destroy, as the man the soothsayer was prone to agitate and be cryptic. Nina Levy and Director Chris Tomlinson deserve praise for bringing this truth to youth theatre.
If YEP’s last production of Till They Kick Us Out was ambitious and impressive, then The Bacchae is an epic that is imposing in sheer scale, of its will to succeed and the stirrings of the extraordinary to come; the Young Everyman Playhouse company are an inspiration to all ages.
Ian D. Hall