Le Baccanti

The Bacchae by Euripides is a text that challenges whoever attempts to stage it on a number of levels”, explains director Andrea De Rosa, “the first and most important challenge is that this is the only tragedy in which the main character is a god (Dionysus). How to portray him? How to bring a god on stage? Nietzsche wrote ‘God is dead’ more than a century ago and, in spite of the absurd religious wars that still appear on the horizon of our most recent history, that death sentence seems incontrovertible and conclusive. But what about what’s sacred? What about what’s mysterious? Are they dead and gone from our lives, too? How to make a god on stage look plausible nowadays, in a world that seems to have forever lost the sense of what’s sacred? Is theatre still the place where a god can be brought to life? where we can still hear his voice and, above all, still question him? Moved by these many questions, I chose to go after Dionysus, the god that has always fascinated us for his tight bond with the feeling of losing oneself and with the vertigo that follows. It’s a hard god to catch, fragile and contradictory, man and woman at the same time, weak and powerful, creative and destructive, but there is quite a lot at stake because he promises men – through wine, drugs, sex, death – permanent liberation from pain.”