Critical Acclaim
Sparagmos, the act of tearing asunder, is a thought-provoking title for the pairing of a classical Greek tragedy with a fifteenth-century Italian fabula. As this imaginative production attests, Euripides’ The Bacchae and Angelo Poliziano’s Orpheus prove dramatically powerful in tandem because the two plays explore the cost of human excess both within and beyond their Bacchanalian contexts.
On entering Exeter College Chapel, the audience is lulled into a false sense of serenity by the overture of Ben van Leeuwen’s original score. As spectators take their seats on either side of the aisle, the disparity between the setting and the Bacchanalian bill of fare to follow creates an unsettling atmosphere enhanced by the lingering aroma of incense. We await the titular sacrificial slaughter.
In the first play, Dionysus, god of wine, returns to Thebes and drives the women of the city mad. He is captured and questioned by King Pentheus, who does not recognize his disguised cousin. On hearing reports that the women, angered by a group of shepherds, have torn apart cattle, Dionysus persuades Pentheus to cross-dress and spy on them before taking further action. Christopher Evans’ plain-spoken, self-assured Dionysus is a striking contrast to Ivo Gruev’s manically vacillating, sexually-confused Pentheus. In the following scenes the King’s gruesome demise at the hands of the frenzied Bacchants is recounted. Their leader is Pentheus’ mother, Agave, whose painfully slow comprehension of the truth of her actions is performed in a poignantly understated fashion by Aoife O'Gorman. The chorus of seven female singers do a technically excellent job of mediating Euripides’ tragedy and make up for the staging’s restrictions on choreography with captivating facial expressions and gestures. While the chorus could have been used to present a more visceral, primitive evocation of Bacchanalian ritual, this version does not shy away from presenting its bodily debris.
The eponymous protagonist of Poliziano’s play is central to the performance of the second half of Sparagmos, not least because his is largely a singing role. Tom Dixon’s countertenor voice is mesmerizing and wholly fitting for the part of Orpheus. Director Lucy Rayfield’s staging choice comes into its own in this play, as the chapel’s narrow, claustrophobic aisle serves to enhance the sense of entrapment experienced by the characters, and is visually apt for the key episode in which Orpheus tries and promptly fails to lead his deceased wife Eurydice out of the Underworld and back into the land of the living. As if Orpheus’ woes were not severe enough, the Bacchants wreak further terror by fatally punishing his vow to eschew all other women. The final scenes of the play include a strikingly convincing portrayal of a depraved and dissolute Bacchant by Fiona Skerman. It is with a mind to maintaining the vernacular spirit of Poliziano’s play that David Maskell’s translation preserves the original terza rima and ottava rima. His natural and often pleasingly colloquial translation-style makes both plays in the double-bill accessible to a modern audience.
While Sparagmos may not quite encourage spectators to join a temperance movement, it does offer a fascinating and entertaining insight into the power and dangers of excess.
Suzanne Jones, DPhil candidate in Medieval and Modern Languages
Keble College, Oxford
‘Sparagmos’ brought together two plays in new English rhyming translations, Euripides’ The Bacchae and Poliziano’s Orpheus, under the inspirational directorship of Lucy Rayfield. As the chosen Greek title highlighted, the two works share the gory theme of dismembering: the first ends with King Pentheus torn apart as punishment for slighting the god Dionysus, while the second closes with the rending of Orpheus by women that he rejects after the loss of his beloved Eurydice. The second tale is perhaps the more familiar, encapsulating the moving power of music and the ultimate irrevocability of loss. The first, however, is wilfully bewildering, playing on a series of unstable oppositions: male versus female; society versus nature; politics versus religion; speech versus music; city versus mountains; bestiality versus ritual.
Beyond thematic similarities, in this production these two plays were pleasingly unified by a number of different voices: firstly, by the voice of the translator, David Maskell, in his accomplished and faithful verse rendition of each work; secondly, by the musical voice of the composer, Ben van Leeuwen, who composed and conducted the music for both plays, arranged for piano and strings. The female chorus of Bacchants was especially powerful and persuasive, aided by their aggressive staring interaction with the audience and striking make-up designs from Claire Moryan which eerily depersonalised the actors and enhanced their collective identity. The task of writing music for Orpheus is no doubt unenviable, given the difficulties of realising a song so beautiful that it could seduce the guardians of the Underworld. Nonetheless, the sweet and memorable tones of Tom Dixon embellished the composer’s sensitive efforts in this direction.
Thirdly and finally, the continuity of talented actors across both plays (most notably, Jean-Patrick Vieu, Ivo Gruev, and Christopher Evans in various guises) contributed to the effective unity of the evening’s entertainment. In the Bacchae, Evans’s Dionysus was suitably mercurial: charming, calculating, evasive, and supremely egomaniacal. Gruev’s turn as a cross-dressing king Pentheus carousing with the eagle lectern-cum-tomb elicited a rare moment of laughter from the audience in two otherwise bleak and disturbing tales. (Daniel Brinkerhoff Young’s charming appearance as a naively enthusiastic rather than predatory Aristeo in Orpheus was another such moment of levity). But Aoife O’Gorman as Agave realising that she herself has torn to pieces her own son was ultimately unsurpassed in sheer poignancy, horror, and regret.
In conclusion, the creative team of Sparagmos are to be lauded for having brought these two challenging, provocative, and haunting plays to life.
Dr Jennifer Rushworth, Junior Research Fellow in Medieval and Modern Languages
St John’s College, Oxford
Dionysus swears revenge on the King of Thebes
Orpheus sings an ode to the Duke of Gonzaga