The Studio, Festival Theatre 10/3/26
Company of Wolves
Ewan Downie, writer and performer
This production is not exactly new. Euripides’ original award-winning tragedy premiered at the Dionysia festival in Athens 406 BCE, and even this solo distillation by Glasgow’s Ewan Downie was first performed in 2023, and has since toured extensively, including to the Fringe. But from today ‘Company of Wolves’ are embarking with their Bacchae on a new country-wide tour.
It is soothing to watch a show which you know has been polished, then performed over and over until it has become embedded and embodied in the memory and muscles of the actor. No wobbles will interrupt the flow, so we too can immerse ourselves.
Ethnic Greek strains have been discreetly playing as the auditorium filled, and fades as the tall young man enters to stand before the crisscross of tubular lights. Downie is bare-foot and bare-headed. He wears a buff jacket to the waist, somewhat shapeless; below it hang the folds of a calico-coloured slip to serve as tunic, chiton, dress.
He opens into a spine-tingling chant in the glorious rounded vowels of classical Greek, their richness thrown into high relief against the sparseness of set and dress. Though perhaps few in the audience understand much of it, we are immediately taken to a time and a place. The words are of the Chorus, and Downie returns to this singing from time to time, dancing the while, skirt whirling.
Over the next hour he metamorphoses to god, demi-god, pregnant girl, king, prisoner, messenger, nursing mother, and a mob of women in bloodthirsty ecstasy, the eponymous Bacchae.
In English, sometimes quite colloquial and modern, he tells the tale of Dionysos (a.k.a. Bacchus), conceived in a love affair between Zeus and a mortal princess who bursts into flames when she glimpses Zeus’ immortal form. Zeus saves the embryo spark that will become Dionysos, gestating it within his thigh, then gives the baby into the care of its mortal aunt Agave. Agave’s own son, Pentheus, becomes king of Thebes, but when Dionysos demands his foster family worship him as a god, they refuse. Vengefully he drives the women of the city up the mountainside to revel in the ecstatic Dionysian rites, then tricks Pentheus into spying upon their orgies. The Bacchae tear him limb from limb as his own mother wrenches his head from its shoulders, and believing she has slain a lion, bears it proudly, madly, down to her horrified family.
All this and more, with the aid of nothing but a deftly manipulated length of Day-Glo orange rope, is narrated and embodied by our performer. Beyond the story-telling, he explores altered and alternating states, rejection/acceptance, victim/tormentor, wise/crazed. And, as Downie puts it, “the spaces between (those) binaries”.
Downie has a fine and varied voice in singing and speaking, but some of the quieter moments were a touch too quiet, at least for the acoustics of the space. The inaudibility was exacerbated by a continual windy walloping close by. It sounded like a builders’ tarpaulin buffeted by the wind. Was it? Was the outside wall missing? It certainly detracted from the immersiveness of the play I’d hoped for and which it deserved.
After the show ends, we in turn are assailed by a bevy of women. These are armed with clipboards, some with doctorates in obscure branches of classical studies, archiving our reaction to the performance. Our answers are enthusiastic.
The company’s name is ‘Company of Wolves’ (is that a homage to Angela Carter’ssensuous retelling of ‘Red Riding Hood’ ?). I’m delighted that, like me, they are enthralled by Ancient Greek myth and drama, and look forward to seeing more of their work.
