Euripides' Bacchae in New Zealand Dress

Euripides' Bacchae is a play which has intrigued, disturbed and challenged many spectators, readers, theatre practitioners and interpreters. Its spectacular and gruesome aspects in particular have also given rise over the years to notable anecdotes, such as that recorded by Plutarch (Crassus 33) to the effect that the Roman general's severed head was carried by the Agave actor in a performance of the play at the Parthian court in 53 BC. At times, moreover, arguably on account of such a graphic portrayal of the elemental and destructive forces unleashed by the Dionysus principle, it has been regarded as 'too hot to handle'. Thus, for example, as Karelisa Hartigan points out, it appears to have made no appearance on the American commercial stage during the first 60 years of the twentieth century.1 The 1960s, however, that most 'Dionysiac' of decades with concerns such as the Vietnam War, flower power, drugs and the gospel of liberation, was almost tailor-made for it. John Carlevale discusses the reception, negative as well as positive, of Dionysus in general in the United States during the decade.2 With regard to Euripides' play itself, the most famous 'realisation' of it was Richard Schechner's Dionysus in 69, staged by the Performance Group, which opened in New York in June 1968, and about which much has been written.3 Free improvisation was the order of the day, although Dionysus in 69 the book, published in 1970, offers 'the text' with its many variants, and there is also a film, made from two actual performances. Among other 'free versions' of the Euripidean play appearing in the wake of Dionysus in 69 but keeping much closer than it did to the original text, mention may be made of Bryan Nason's Bacchoi [sic], which opened the Schonell Theatre at the University of Queensland on 24 September 1970 and which later was the first play performed at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney, and Wole Soyinka's Africanised version (subtitled A Communion Rite), first presented by the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic on 2 August 1973. In addition, also appearing in the 1960s are actual re-workings or radical rewritings of the Bacchae, such as The Disorderly Women by John Bowen, an ancient Greece/modern setting hybrid whose first professional production was at the Stables Theatre Club, Manchester, on 19 February 1969, and Rodney Milgate's Australian drama A Refined Look at Existence, first presented at Jane Street Theatre, Randwick, New South Wales on 1 November 1966. These plays are in some ways very different from one another, reflecting as they do the particular emphases of their authors and the concerns of the audiences for which they were written. At the same time, however, they are all descendants of the Bacchae and deal with the same basic theme - namely the conflict between, on the one hand, the ordered, organised, civilised, authoritarian, rational, materialistic and moral (often hypocritically so) and, on the other, the intuitive, natural, irrational, spiritual, boundary-crossing and amoral. It is in this overall international context that we should locate Mr O'Dwyer's Dancing Party which was written in 1967 by the New Zealander James K. Baxter (1926-1972) and first performed at the Globe Theatre in Dunedin on 14 November 1968. Baxter is certainly New Zealand's best known and most prolific poet, and arguably its most significant. His plays, however, are not so well known and his current standing as a dramatist is far less secure. Mr O'Dwyer's Dancing Party itself, moreover, cannot be regarded as one of his better or more successful plays and, indeed, apart from further performances at the Globe in 1969, it does not appear to have been revived elsewhere. However, it is still well worth discussing, both because it belongs to a group of new plays which collectively at the time helped to revitalise home-grown New Zealand drama, and also because of its connection, already mentioned, with a growing engagement with Euripides' play on a global scale. …