Theatre Review: City of Wine
By Robert Cushman, National Post
The Greeks with their all-day tragic festivals didn’t just invent drama. They invented the dramatic cycle, the experience of sitting in a theatre for a long time following one proliferating story. So it’s natural that later playwrights planning marathons should turn to the same material. Ned Dickens, an otherwise untried writer, has devoted seven plays, and 16 years of his life, to retelling the tale of Thebes, a sex-and-blood-drenched saga that peaks in the story of Oedipus but starts generations earlier. All seven are now being mounted in sequence in Toronto, in a kind of super-workshop, by seven different theatre schools from around the country, under the auspices of the professional company Nightswimming. It’s a dizzyingly ambitious feat of producing and, despite inevitable unevenness in writing and production, a dizzying achievement.
Pentheus (from Humber), the second play and the most impressive of the five I saw in preview this week, shows us the founding couple advanced in years and disillusion as their town, and especially its women, are possessed by the newly born god Dionysus, here called — with surprising inconsistency — by his Roman name of Bacchus. He brings wine, which becomes the city’s staple product and cultural identity; the lower orders are especially fond of it. This is the story told in Euripides’ Bacchae, culminating in the dismembering of Pentheus, the immature new king, by his own crazed mother.
The plays are written in verse, mainly blank: a sensible decision, but a perilous one. Iambic pentameter is an inherently conversational medium, but no dramatists since the Elizabethans have been able to use it unselfconsciously. When Dickens feels a lyrical lament coming on, the air turns fanciful and unconvincing. But he can also hack out a biting one-liner; when Pentheus calls the gods “pathetic pouting mockeries of man” he has a point, especially about Bacchus. They’re us at our worst, irresponsible because immortal. Ancient Greek theology is terrifying and convincing.
The stagings vary in style and accomplishment. Many actors double as musicians. One play features a hero who plays the lyre, which seems to be what we moderns call a mouth organ. Another features a Ukrainian folk band. A third obscures much vital exposition, by singing it over clangorous homemade accompaniment. Some directors put their performers in exposed positions, physically and emotionally, without giving them much support. But one production, Tatiana Jennings’ Humber Pentheus, is astonishing, from its initial display of rhythmically shuffling divinities, chanting in amplified whispers. It has a sound score by the great Richard Feren, and choreography (by Sharon Moore) whose hypnotically measured frenzy helps both author and actors to go head to head with Euripides’ masterpiece and survive. Its Bacchus (Aaron Rothermund) is properly, and unnervingly, faun-like, while if there were a professional production tomorrow this Pentheus (Colin Bruce Anthes), rash, uptight, spooked by sexual uncertainty, could go into it undaunted and unchanged.
City of Wine closes May 9 at Theatre Passe Muraille. For details, call 416-504-7529.
[The production of City of Wine involved 165 actors and artists. Photo by John Lauener.]
