At first, you might think you are at the wrong performance. But soon, Elli Papakonstantinou's The Bacchae offers us a Nietzschean gaze into the abyss.

The first ten to twenty minutes of The Bacchae are quite misleading. On stage, a dining hall is demarcated by curtains. A neatly set table with kitschy tablecloths, bows, and draperies. Lots of silver and gold. In their fine but rather stiff clothing, the actors seem primarily poised to perform a costume drama. Are we even at the right performance? The Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou is actually known for the dazzling way she makes ancient Shakespearean classics and Greek mythologies explode at theater festivals.

Thus, under her hands, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex was transformed into the musical pop spectacle Oedipus: Sex with Mum Was Blinding (2019), featuring a deluge of visual projections and frenzied acting. With Alcestis (2021), she created a feminist version of Euripides' earliest known play. With Eros , she intended to subject Plato's Symposium to a similar theatrical-musical mash-up, together with a Ukrainian company. But just before the premiere, the war began, and she radically changed it into a performance in which the actors were present via a livestream from Kyiv.

Add to all that emphatically contemporary engagement the fact that Papakonstantinou likes to make use of modern technology – facial recognition, game avatars, live visuals – and it is clear that this is a theatre maker who is at the heart of current events. At the same time, with her mythological sources of inspiration, she positions herself precisely within a tradition with an ancient past.

You also notice that intriguing dual attitude in the opening of The Bacchae . Anyone who reread Euripides' original beforehand assumes that we are in the royal palace of King Pentheus of Thebes. At the same time, as soon becomes clear, we find ourselves in a future that is not specifically dated.

The fact that science fiction and mythology intersect is by no means new and is, in a sense, self-evident. Both abstract reality, only the direction differs. With mythology, the imagination focuses on history—in this case, Euripides' story served in part to explain the arrival of the Asian god Dionysus—and in science fiction, that imagination is future-oriented. In this piece, that takes the form of a meteorite approaching Earth. Cosmic disaster that we know from films such as Armageddon, Deep Impact, Melancholia , and more recently Don't Look Up.

The Bacchae initially shares a somewhat satirical undertone with the latter . For instance, King Pentheus is hammering away rather heavily at proper manners and proper nutrition, delivering commercial-style speeches about it. The company throws itself at ambrosia-50, a green jelly in the shape of a perfectly straight cube.

We find ourselves in a tightly ordered universe, the message goes, with fixed male-female divisions, with rigid regulations and laws. Only the unashamedly sensual way in which some lick their plates clean reveals that something is brewing beneath the surface.

In this rational world, as a spectator, you also try to keep track of what is happening rationally. Who exactly is who from the original? Who are the male actors, who the women? And who is speaking, anyway? The combination of stick-on microphones and subtitles on the side of the stage is sometimes a bit confusing, especially since there is little traditional dialogue here in which actors react to each other. They address the audience primarily through monologues, short cries, and aria-like outbursts of song.

Then a stranger arrives. That must be Dionysus, played by Ariah Lester, the charismatic performer from Venezuela, currently still unrecognizable, huddled under a hood. He calls upon everyone to follow their deepest desires. For one of the servants, that means making videos that go viral. For the other, it is about getting rich. But no, that is of course not what Dionysus means. Do they feel no physical desire? Not really, admits one of the servants, who is apparently meant to represent the passionlessness of this (our?) efficiently ordered society.

And then, just when a slight disappointment is impossible to suppress, just when you fear that the performance will remain a bit tame, the performance breaks open.

It begins with a brutal rape, behind the scenes, but filmed with a camera and projected life-size over the guests at the dinner party. At first, it remains stiff, but soon it is as if a bomb has exploded on stage. Set pieces swirl in all directions, clothing is largely taken off, and in a succession of dance, music, and visual effects, we find ourselves in an ecstatic, orgy-like flow.

In Euripides' storyline, we have arrived at the moment when Pentheus, who had learned of the new Dionysian culture—degenerate in his eyes—wants to take heavy action against it. The stranger advises him to disguise himself as a woman so that he can attend the Bacchantes' orgies unseen.

Here the performance lifts off the ground and transforms into an ecstatic burst of energy that no longer speaks through the mind but works directly on the senses. It is exhilarating, sexual, but above all suggestive, partly because the participants in this orgy rarely have contact with each other, but everyone copulates with an imaginary partner.

All genres have now been broken down: dance, theatre, literature, performance, film, pop, classical opera. But languages ​​are also merging. We hear Spanish, English, Greek, Italian, French… And it is no longer clear who is a man, a woman, or anything in between.

The creators explicitly want to present a queer version of Euripides' Bacchae . One could say that this original, four centuries before our era, was already 'queer'. There is the masquerade of Pentheus as a woman, just as female roles in the amphitheaters at the time were always played by men, including those of the Bacchantes, but it naturally remained a male-dominated structure.

According to Elli Papakonstantinou, queer is more than just a set of sexual preferences. It is a 'new aesthetic', a 'possibility to look at the world in an entirely new, open way'. That is an interesting thought, but one about which there will not necessarily be consensus within the queer community. There are plenty of queer people for whom their identity does not have to mean a radically different worldview at all.

It is also not unproblematic that this new queer aesthetic in this narrative coincides with the cult of Dionysus. Granted, the latter can be seen as a movement providing an outdated, rigid culture with new vital impulses, but here it inevitably comes with the association of debauchery, decadence, and violence.

As in all Greek dramas, the original ends bloodily, in a world of betrayal, deceit, and revenge. In an ecstatic frenzy, Pentheus is mistaken for a wild animal by his mother and killed. A moralistic interpretation can be attached to this.

In Donna Tartt's bestseller The Secret History (1992), a similar tragic lynching occurs when Greek students perform a Dionysian ritual on their own initiative, which is certainly not presented as something worth emulating.

Until the nineteenth century, Euripides' play was considered too gruesome and too licentious, but that changed when Nietzsche defended it in *The Birth of Tragedy* (1872).

In this, Nietzsche contrasts two life forces: the 'Apollinian' (which strives for beauty, harmony, laws, and intellect) against the 'Dionysian' (which strives for chaos, intoxication, and ecstasy). However, Nietzsche did not advocate a reckless surrender to the Dionysian either. His primary concern was restoring the balance between the two. According to him, true tragedy existed only briefly, during the time when both these forces were present. Subsequently, culture shifted towards the Apollonian, with Socratic philosophy, science, and Christian morality.

The Dionysian intoxication, the 'immeasurable primal lust of existence', is stirred up when we catch a glimpse of the abyss. Then, says Nietzsche, 'we are forced to face the horrors of individual existence – but we do not freeze with fear, for a metaphysical consolation tears us away for a moment from the turmoil of fleeting figures'.

This Bacchante performance gives us such a glimpse into that abyss. The wonderfully exuberant playing and singing Ariah Lester and the ODC Ensemble immerse the audience in such a trance.

Even the stage floor participates. It becomes an instrument itself, as the movements on it are directly converted into sounds, and because it is connected to a seismograph that records the tremors on the spot on a roll of paper, which subsequently also becomes part of this Dionysian dance.

By then, we have left Euripides far behind. The storyline, insofar as there is such a thing left, takes a more scientific turn, towards single-celled life and something that perhaps suggests a return to the Big Bang. That all remains rather vague, just as the entire narrative line is not the strongest part of this performance. It relies mainly on the music, the choreography, the visual outbursts, and how they work together to make the audience part of one compelling and unsettling cosmos.