Glasgow’s acclaimed Company of Wolves present an earth-shattering solo retelling of the myth of Dionysos: an epic of rejection, vengeance and rebirth told through story, dance and ancient song. Tickets https://companyofwolves.org/projects/the-bacchae
What compelled you to return to The Bacchae, and why did it feel right to inhabit the entire myth alone on stage?
I first encountered the original play of The Bacchae thirty-odd years ago, at university, and it has lived in my imagination ever since. The idea for making a solo version of the story appeared when I was making my previous solo, Achilles, as a counterpart to that piece – energetically, they are opposites. So part of it was to do with a sense of balance.
In the original play, Dionysos manipulates the other characters, like a puppeteer, or a director, or the author of the piece – and I began to wonder if the whole story might take place inside his mind – just as all of us have stories and memories we return to and can’t let go – that maybe this whole story is him trying to make sense of his origins and history.
In portraying Dionysus as “a mind at war with itself,” how did you approach balancing divinity, vulnerability, and threat?
One of the questions I asked myself throughout the process was about the nature of Dionysos. For me, one of the key discoveries was that Dionysos is the god of both sides of a duality – so part of the work of the piece has been to find ways to shift between those roles in any given situation, to try to inhabit both sides of the experience: mortal/god, animal/human. Pretty much any time you ask the question “is Dionysos this or tha?t” the answer seems to be “Yes.”
How does shifting between five mythological characters alter the audience’s perception of identity and fractured selfhood?
I think we’re all made up of different voices and perspectives, that sometimes work together and sometimes are at war with one another. And our sense of other people is made up of some combination of who that person is, in and of themselves, and our own beliefs and stories about them. And that’s OK. Maybe seeing this fragmented self onstage will help people relax a bit about their own inner conflicts and contradictions. I hope so. If we were all perfectly efficient and logically coherent, the world would be very dull.
What meanings emerged for you by placing this ancient story within a contemporary landscape of neon light and confinement?
I tend not to think so much about what a piece means, more about what gives it the strongest energetic charge.
When we were building the design — which was done very collaboratively, between me, our designer Alisa Kalynova, our lighting designer Katharine Williams and Ian, the director — we talked a lot about what might be on the stage, and we were looking for a staging that had some of the hallmarks of ritual. Ritual often uses what’s available, what happens to be at hand. Our production manager, Craig Fleming, brought the crates in one day as a stand-in, and we just all felt they were right, so they stayed and we built the design around them.
How did your collaboration with the late Ian Spink shape the piece’s physical and emotional language?
Ian was an amazing listener, and he was willing to give things the time and space to develop into what they needed to be. I hope some of his spirit remains in the show. When he was very ill towards the end of the rehearsal process, he would send us cryptic texts and notes of things he’d thought of, which we would try to decode. Most of them ended up in the show in one way or another.
As the production moves from repression toward release, what kind of transformation do you hope audiences experience alongside you?
I hope they travel with me, from the shores of the known into the strange world of this play, and come back a little different – maybe more able to accept the different and strange.