![]() ![]() As a man, I certainly found it one of the more triggering things I've ever seen on a stage. In one striking scene, Pentheus tries to masturbate to Internet pornography in private – little knowing that we, the audience, are watching him fumbling around in his pants while the threesome on his screen is blurred. ![]() And, yes, though a sign outside the theatre lets timid theatregoers know there will be "explicit scenes of eroticism," another could be added, with the warning: "There will be laughing at men." Keiley's production is an attempt to demolish that idea, top to bottom, presenting this classic tragedy resolutely through the female gaze. His Achilles heel, if you'll pardon the myth muddling, is that he believes the male gaze is reality. Pentheus has an idea – many men have this idea – that he can somehow see women without being seen by them. Carson nods at another Canadian poet, Margaret Atwood, when she has the rigid ruler express his utmost fear about this plan: "Most important: These women must not laugh at me." Miller, who regularly gives wonderful performances as comic sidekicks at Stratford, is exquisite here, depicting the war between the pleasure and panic Pentheus feels within himself as he slips into a dress. Pentheus's real downfall comes when he decides to don women's clothing to spy on the Bakkhai. As Dionysos warns him: "Man against god – never wins." In order to reassert control over the women and their sexuality, Pentheus tries to jail the so-called Bakkhai – and their beloved Bakkhos, too. ![]() "Meanwhile, they call themselves a prayer group! Obviously, it's just sex." "There's a lot of wine involved and creeping off into corners with men," he tells us. Pentheus, the ruler of Thebes (played by Miller as a matter-of-fact middle manager), is disturbed by the fact that the women of his city – including his mother, Agave – have run off to the hills to engage in strange rituals in worship of this Dionysos. You may know this play as The Bacchae and the god of the grape as Dionysus or Bacchus, but Carson has fresh ideas about spelling – and pretty much everything else in her swaggering, authoritative translation. ![]()
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