Critics praise Ben Whishaw in Bakkhai

Michael Coveney, WhatsOnStage

★★★★★

"The uninterrupted two hours flashes by without once veering towards the domestic banality or soap opera excesses of the Oresteia last month."

"A production by James Macdonald that is close to the original in its text and yet absolutely pertinent for our times."

"You see the point of it as the play is about transformation, moving through one's own mythologies, not just a face-off between the polar opposites of man and god, sex and sterility, sanity and madness."

Michael Billington, The Guardian

★★★

"I felt I was seeing a well-managed, coolly rational production of a play that should usher us into the wild, irrational realm of the frenziedly daemonic."

"The production’s determination to respect Euripidean ambivalence extends to the performances. As in Greek classical theatre, three actors play all the speaking roles."

"As the disguised divinity [Ben Whishaw] bears a distinct resemblance, with his beard and light green robe, to the Austrian drag artist Conchita Wurst. Under the androgynous grace, however, Whishaw intelligently suggests that there lurks a vindictive cruelty and desire to triumph over insubordinate humans."

Paul Taylor, The Independent

★★★★

"I felt that I was seeing Euripides' late masterpiece for the first time in this strange, thrilling, brilliantly cast account of the terrible revenge that Dionysus engineers against King Pentheus "

"Bertie Carvel's excellent Pentheus is a crisply suited control-freak PM, the blinkered impatience of his secularist mission comically caught in the performance"

"They do glorious justice to Orlando Gough's a capella music – ravishing beauty splintering into eerie dissonances and percussive animal yelps."

Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard

★★★★

"Whishaw thrillingly immerses himself in the role. At first he’s feline and flirtatious, a hybrid of Russell Brand and Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, but he reveals a more brutal side when he gives vent to his frustrations."

"Anne Carson‘s new translation captures the original’s concern with ideas of balance and doubleness, but it also has a gritty immediacy"

"The result is two hours of raw and exacting theatre. But it convincingly makes the case for why it’s still worth engaging with a play written almost 2,500 years ago."

Natasha Tripney, The Stage

★★★★

"Ben Whishaw is delicate yet magnetic as Dionysus, impish and strange, clad in a sweeping fawn skin gown with black hair streaming over his shoulders, he is a gender-fluid, mercurial, definitely sexual presence, at times Christ-like."

"Sometimes [the chorus] sound they make is quite beautiful, rhythmic and mournful, but at other times their wailing becomes incessant. There’s just so much of it and the momentum of the production suffers for it. But though it undulates tonally, when Whishaw and Carvel are on stage it contains moments of inspired madness."

"A strange startling, occasionally frustrating, often magical production of Euripides"

Bakkhai runs at the Almedia until 19 September 2015.