This week Woody explores a half-drunk realisation he had.
Hello. So, the other day I had a few beers and sat thinking about our recent production Before They Told You What You Are (for which we may need a shorter title – I shall make a note) when a thought occurred. In this post I shall attempt to express that thought. Partly this is because I think it might interest you, but mostly it’s because my having an interesting idea is a rare enough thing that I wish to have a record of it. In years to come when I’m sat in a rocking chair, my beard snow-white and grown down to my ankles, my mind decayed by years of theatrical debauchery I shall be able to justify my decrepit cries of “I had a thought once!” by pointing people to this post.
This is me while thinking (artist’s impression)
Now, the myth of the Bacchae concerns itself with what happens to Thebes when the women of the city go out to the wildy-wilds to take part in rites dedicated to Dionysus. This event is the hub around which the action of the myth spins, as if in a Bacchic dance. In Euripides’ version, however, we never go up to the mountainside to see the women; in his play we’re stuck down in the city watching Dionysus flirt with King Pentheus, Pentheus himself getting angrier and angrier about what’s going on. We only really hear about the women in Pentheus’ imaginings about what they’re getting up to, and in two messenger speeches – one of which contradicts Pentheus’ voyeuristic imaginings, the other tells us about Pentheus’ death at the hands of the women. We the audience only see the women after the sparagmos (the ripping apart) so that Agave can have her anagnorisis (moment where she realises everything’s gone to pot) onstage.
There are reasons for Euripides to keep the female characters in his play offstage. One is the theatrical convention of the time that the action of play should all occur in the same place. The other is that if he were to stage his play on the mountain with the women the sparagmos would be occurring right where the action was taking place, and showing violent acts onstage was simply not done. We here at By Jove HQ aren’t bound by the same conventions as Euripides so we could do things differently. We wanted to explore how Dionysus’ machinations affected the women of Thebes, see the levers he pulled on them to attain his goals. If you want, as we do, to create feminist versions of myths, a good place to start is getting the female characters onstage, and *gasp* letting them speak.
In our version they are on stage, and they do speak. We see Agave wanting to be included with the decision-making of the Theban state. We have a hymn to Dionysus in which the women state why they might find appealing a cult which promises them freedom in a space away from the patriarchal rules of their society. We have Agave voicing her own reasons for why she killed her son. Our plays closing, tragic image is of a woman’s desperation in trying to regain the freedom she felt. Our male characters’ actions are driven by their thoughts about the women in their lives. See what I mean? Lots of women all throughout in this play what we done.
The realisation that my beer and I had (he said, finally getting to the point almost six hundred words into the post) is that in our play one could say the women of Thebes are just that: The Women. They have no identity apart from that label. Agave gets a name because she kills her son, Semele gets a name because she gave birth to a god. But the others? The female population of an entire city whose mass exodus is the central point of the plot? They’re generally referred to as ‘our women’ or ‘they’.
The women of Thebes can be referred to as a single, undifferentiated crowd, because they were wrong (in the same sense that Oedipus was wrong about who his parents were) as a crowd. Pentheus is wrong about how to do what’s right for his female compatriots and gets torn apart for his trouble. At the end of the play the women have also failed, and have done so because they were wrong. They were wrong in that they were tricked by Dionysus into believing it would be so simple to get equality and liberation for themselves. They believed Dionysus when he “To get freedom, safety, power, agency, whatever it is you want, all you have to do is join my cult and complete as few specific rituals.” All he gave them was an illusion. The patriarchs of their society respected (read: “feared”) them for a while, they got a bit of space to themselves, and could do some cool tricks; then, when Dionysus got what he wanted out of them he buggered off and the illusion shattered. The women of Thebes were right to realise they did not have the things they wanted, but those things are big and getting them is a complex and time-consuming process.
Campaigning over years, generations even, to attain true equality is a struggle, but the results this method gets are much more solid than those received by waiting for a god with a fondness for leopard print to wander along and give them away. There are no quick-fixes to our societal problems. To solve things like street-harrasment, violence, discrimination, and income equality there needs to be a stupefying level of effort from a load of dedicated and talented people who are probably going to be vilified, patronised, dismissed and attacked by those in favour of the status quo. Gods, that’s a bit depressing. I suppose it makes sense that we picked a tragedy to make the point.
One hopes you’re well,
yrs,
ADWoodward
