Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright's Bacchae: A Forgotten Turning Point in Australian Classical Performance Reception

In 2006, Australian theatre director Barrie Kosky staged Tom Wright’s adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae at Sydney Theatre Company. This stripped back version of Bacchae cut the choral odes, subjected the play’s language to extreme torsion, and emphasised the violence and misogyny of the original. Set in a male urinal, perhaps at a queer nightclub, where anonymous bodyguards entered to beat Dionysus and where bodily fluids frequently and visibly flowed, Bacchae was an example of what Charlotte Farrell terms Kosky’s post-tragic theatre, connected to but radically moving beyond dramatic tragedy. Yet because Bacchae was nestled within a wider project, namely Kosky and Wright’s The Lost Echo, an eight-hour adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the Bacchae has largely been forgotten. It has never been published, is not archived in the AusStage database as a stand-alone adaptation, and its significance has been underplayed in scholarship on The Lost Echo in favour of a focus on the Ovidian content.

Looking back on Bacchae two decades after it was staged, this paper argues that it is a forgotten turning point in Australian classical performance reception. I focus upon the dramaturgy of Tom Wright’s adaptation and showcase the impact of the visceral and vernacular nature of his script upon subsequent Australian rewritings of the classics. I also flag how Kosky’s transformation of the text established specific directorial tropes which were echoed in subsequent tragedy productions not only directed by Kosky, but also by other Australian directors such as Simon Stone. Overall, I suggest that overlooking Kosky and Wright’s Bacchae is to misunderstand the history of Greek tragedy in Australia so far this century and argue in favour of elevating this adaptation to a more prominent position within our theatre history.

Image credit: Greek Theatre.jpg