Greek tragedy for our times

There exists no more challenging stage-direction than one in The Bacchae where a mother appears "frenzied and panting". All exultant and in the grip of drug-fuelled ecstasy, she holds the severed head of her adult son, King Pentheus, which she has helped detach from his body.

It says plenty for the imaginative vitality of Kneehigh Theatre's free, modern-dress adaptation of Euripides's last, great drama that this mad scene is dispatched with more primitive conviction than many traditional productions.

Anyone, though, eager for the real Euripidean original, may be disappointed. Scriptwriters Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy have given Euripides a spectacular make-over. Ingenious director Emma Rice ensures Euripides's warnings against the extremes of repressive and liberated behaviour resound. Otherwise, this is a teenagers' or beginners' Bacchae, by vivid turns jocular, accessible and horrifying.

Shocks and surprises are delivered in a jaunty, bathetic style owing little to realism. At times it seems as if the tragedy is being sent up in a Monty Python manner. You hear a distant cacophony of screams, cheers and drums as at a rock concert.

"This behaviour will not be tolerated," shouts Pentheus, who though dressed in dark, military wear, reminded me of an angry traffic warden. Ladders and white ballet skirts hang from the rafters. It is into these skirts that a chorus of middle-aged men camply slip, dance and prance, playing Dionysus's female followers.

There is no serious reason for assigning just these female roles to men; the decision to make them transvestite joke-figures duly amuses but diminishes the play's high seriousness.

The adaptation and production does, however, take a riveting turn to the serious. The simmering tension is heightened by talented actors - though I cannot identify them as the company's names are listed, while the roles they take are not.

Pentheus is held in the fierce gaze of an imposing, longlimbed, Far-eastern Dionysus. The homo-erotic scene in which the king is disrobed and dressed in women's clothes chillingly marks the loss of royal power. Pentheus's murder, which is only described in Euripides's original, is here thrillingly staged with a wild, hysterical energy. Pentheus's blood-spattered mother turns savagely bestial.

Eloquent music, Greek, hard rock and Indian, with cello, accordion and guitar pre-eminent, heralds the emotional transitions of this shocking, born-again Bacchae.

Until 20 November. Information: 0870 050 0511.

The Bacchae