As we get ready for the release of a brand new recording of SJ Brady’s Here She Comes, an adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae, David Bullen takes a look at the character of Agave from the ancient to the modern stage.
Agave appears at the end of Euripides’ Bacchae in one of the most haunting scenes in Greek tragedy. At the beginning of the play she left the city with all the other women of Thebes, ‘stung to madness’ by Dionysus. On Mount Cithaeron, she joins her fellow Theban women in celebrating the god: they dance, they interact harmoniously with nature, and they produce miraculous springs of water, wine, honey, and milk. When some herdsmen attempt to capture Agave and the other women on the orders of her son, King Pentheus, she leads a horde of maenads in violent revolt. Then, later, when Pentheus comes to spy on the women dressed as one of them, Agave leads the charge again – thinking Pentheus is a lion. After the king is torn apart, Agave comes to the stage brandishing his head. At first she still thinks it is a lion’s head in her hands, but gradually she realises the truth. Dionysus has punished her as much as her son for the crime of once claiming he was not really a god. She has the penultimate line of the play, here in Anne Carson’s translation:
Lead me away. … May I never go near Cithaeron again, never set eyes on it, never see a thyrsos, never remember a moment of this. Leave the thyrsos to the Bacchae…
AGAVE IN 405 BCE
While Agave is frequently named as one of the daughters of Cadmus, there is no evidence of her being Pentheus’ chief killer until Euripides’ play in 405 BCE – which is quite late in the history of Greek myth. Vase paintings of Pentheus’ death tend not to name the maenads that do the deed.
Red-figure cup showing the death of Pentheus, c. 480 BCE
So it is possible that Euripides invented Agave as the murderer. And the way Bacchae would have been performed in 405 BCE, with an all male cast playing multiple roles with the aid of masks and costumes, makes this a fascinating possibility. Because we know there were only three professional actors playing the named characters (an amateur group of young Athenian men would have played the chorus), we can work out the likely doublings in the play. Astonishingly, the actor who played Pentheus would have most likely played Agave as well, with Pentheus’ mask used as a head. Given Pentheus’ character arc, this means that the actor would have had the opportunity to give a tour-de-force performance as he played a man, a man dressed as a woman, and then a woman (and the mother of the man he had been playing earlier!). While modern productions have often focused attention on Pentheus and Dionysus – the role of the god has attracted major names like Ben Whishaw, Jonathan Groff, and Alan Cumming – the combined Pentheus-Agave part may well have been the star role when the play first debuted and in subsequent revivals.
AGAVE IN REVIVAL
We know that Bacchae was a popular play after its first performance, in Greece and beyond. Alexander the Great purportedly played Pentheus to his mother Olympias’ Agave – who was, supposedly, a devoted worshipper of Dionysus. Given their fraught relationship, that performance must have been quite something to watch.
Angelina Jolie as Olympias and Colin Farrell as Alexander in Oliver Stone’s 2004 biopic of the Macedonian king. Jolie is only one year older than Farrell, which adds a further dimension of weirdness to the idea of Olympias and Alexander as Agave and Pentheus.
The ancient biographer Plutarch gives an even weirder story about Bacchae: after the Roman general Crassus was killed in 53 BCE, his head was used as a prop by the actor playing Agave in a post-battle performance put on by the victors. This may be the only time in history when the play has been performed with an actual severed head – it must have added a whole new quality to that shocking final scene.
AGAVE IN THE MODERN WORLD
Bacchae was considered such a shockingly violent play that it wasn’t staged in the modern world until 1908. This first performance was at the Royal Court Theatre in London, England. It was put on by prominent actress and suffragist Lillah McCarthy, who also took the role of Dionysus. Agave was played by Winifred Mayo, who was as much an activist as she was an actress. While the production didn’t make much of the moment in which it appeared, the times were certainly fraught, and particularly apt for Bacchae: the fight for women to get the vote was reaching boiling point, with violence breaking out in the months running up to the show. Emmeline Pankhurst, whose Women’s Social and Political Union was most associated with militant suffragette tactics, was imprisoned while the show was in rehearsal. Many of the women in the production were also involved in the fight for the vote, especially Mayo: she had also been in prison earlier that year, and less than a month after Bacchae premiered, she helped to found the Actresses’ Franchise League. This organisation became one of the leading suffrage groups representing the arts in England. You can hear a rare archival recording of Mayo discussing her suffrage activism here.
In the late sixties, at the outset of second wave feminism, Agave really came into her own with Maureen Duffy’s play Rites (1968/69). In a radical adaptation for the period – one of the first explicitly feminist dramas in the UK – Duffy recentres the story of Bacchae around Agave, rather than Pentheus. Set in a women’s public toilets in King’s Cross Station in London, Agave becomes Ada, a jaded, misandrist, and wickedly funny toilet attendant. With her hapless sidekick Meg, Ada acts as ‘chief priestess’ of the eponymous gender rites that mark the daily cycle of life in the toilets: the comings and goings of women from different walks of life who gather together in a space away from the predations of men. In the original production Ada was played by Geraldine McEwan, who is perhaps best remembered now for her much later turn as Miss Marple!
Rites was staged by the National Theatre of Great Britain (then in residence at the Old Vic), and Agave has appeared twice more on that company’s stage. Agave provided a stunning finale to the 1973 production of Wole Soyinka’s adaptation, which recontextualised the Greek myth amid Yoruba culture. The play was subtitled ‘A Communion Rite’ and it was Agave who provided this on stage: at the culmination of her scene, Pentheus’ head erupts in a fountain of what initially appears to be blood but turns out to be wine. Just under thirty years later, Agave returned in Peter Hall’s 2002 production. Hall adopted a more traditionalist approach, casting only three actors as the named characters and using masks to facilitate this. This meant that audiences were able to see something akin to how ancient Athenians would have first encountered Agave, doubled with her son Pentheus. William Houston played both roles on that occasion. A similar approach was taken by the Almeida in 2015, though this time actor Bertie Carvel performed the roles without the aid of masks. This made sense as, at the time, Carvel was well known for his award-winning turn as Miss Trunchbull in the RSC’s musical adaptation of Matilda. Unfortunately many critics read Agave a little too much through the lens of Trunchbull, though Carvel’s lament to the scattered pieces of her son’s body was very moving.
Bertie Carvel as Miss Trunchbull in Matilda (2010)…
…and as Agave in Bakkhai (2015).
Although Agave has an astonishing scene in Bacchae, the pragmatic conditions of modern theatre make it difficult to convince major names to play the role. This has, in part, resulted in Agave not being quite as prominent as Medea or Clytemnestra in modern performance. Casting a single performer for both Pentheus and Agave has been one strategy employed to boost the role’s profile, but audiences today have a tendency to read men playing women in a very different way to those who would have been watching in 405 BCE. But when the role is played by a woman who is allowed to make it her own, the results can be show-stopping. In the Manchester Royal Exchange production in 2010, for example, Agave was played by Anglo-Greek actor Eve Polycarpou in a powerhouse performance that realised the full potential of Euripides’ scene. More recently, Akiko Aizawa played Agave in Anne Bogart’s production for the SITI Company in 2018. Here, Aizawa spoke entirely in unsurtitled Japanese, powerfully articulating the distance between her and the other characters in the otherwise English-language production.
Eve Polycarpou as Agave in the 2010 Manchester Royal Exchange production of Bacchae.
These are just a few highlights of Agave’s journey from antiquity to the twenty-first century. You can hear SJ Brady’s epic reimagining of the story, which is centred around Agave, in By Jove’s second piece of #LockdownTheatre on 12 July. This specially prepared audio version of Here She Comes, featuring music composed and performed by Vivienne Youel, will premiere with a live listening party on YouTube. And if you want to learn more about Agave and Bacchae throughout the ages, you can tune into David Bullen’s pre-show talk, which will be streamed live from our Facebook page.
