Bacchanalia review: an intimate piece that stands alongside the best immersive theatre in the business

Back for its second run at CRYPT, Baccanlia emerges as an energetic free-roam immersive adaptation of Euripides' Bacchae. For all of you who’s Greek theatre is a bit rusty/non-existant, I read a couple of lines of Wikipedia before going and recommend you do the same. In a nutshell: a vengeful god of wine and revelry, Dyonisus, arrives to Thebes keen to assert his god status which is doubted by the king Pentheus. Tragedy ensues.

The set clearly didn’t command the budget of larger scale productions but was non-the-less impressively crafted; enveloping us cloaked city-dwellers in a mid-20th century Thebes where the incumbent royal house are clinging to tradition and the newcomers are getting freaky with the times. The experience is mostly in the intense bent, it is a Greek tragedy after all, but there are much-needed emotional-breaks provided by a 60s soundtrack and choreography that will throw you a sassy tongue-in-cheek moment in amongst all the writhing.

Drawing clear inspiration from the structure and energy of Punchdrunk’s movement-led classical retellings, what truly distinguishes this production is the palpable intimacy it fosters, serving both the storytelling and audience experience. With only 40 audience members against 7 actors, in a performance space that largely consists of four small rooms and a corridor, the characters were well-established and action was well scripted and paced - repetitive enough that you could be in no doubt of the main thrust of the scene within a few seconds, with enough story development that you were perfectly happy watching all 3 or so minutes. Despite the smaller space, we somehow had more agency than some larger productions because you weren’t operating under the constant threat of, for want of a better phrase, losing the plot.

The result was that we the audience were able to operate separately but be together moved, bearing fractured witness to the unravelling of Pentheus’ mother as she faces the newly risen Bacchae - an extraordinary triumph of immersive theatre. A small but powerful collective imagination created magic; we revelled in each other’s experience, sharing in the bravery and awkwardness of the few willing humans in the room - sharing a dance, jumping into a wardrobe or whispering weird demonic stuff at each other.

I’m just going to say it - for me, it beats out some mass-scale work which perhaps inevitably results in an inscrutable storyline for the average theatre goer as well as an “us-and-them” relationship between actor and audience member (and on occasion between audience members jostling for interactions with actors).

In it’s first outing, production company Sleepwalk Immersive has managed to create a piece that can stand alongside some of the best names in the business. I look forward to seeing how they really start pushing at those established boundaries in future work.

This is a special moment to catch the work of young theatre makers that’s energetic, hungry and full of promise. For the gods’ sake go and catch it.