The author reviews a performance of Wole Soyinka's adaptation of The Bacchae of Euripides directed by Amanda Price at the University of Leeds in 1990. Soyinka's version sets the Greek tragedy in an African context, using African languages and references to contemporary African politics. The performance highlighted the clash between rigid authority and religious fanaticism, and left questions about reconciling social classes through symbolic gestures rather than meaningful political change. Overall, the author praised the production for its exploration of complex political and social issues but questioned Soyinka's ambiguous conclusion.

1. 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. 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. 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. 4 Kemi Atanda Ilori, “Soyinka’s Bacchae of Communion” – A Review of the
Performance of Wole Soyinka’s “The Bacchae of Euripides”