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Arrata Opera Centre

Dionysus may be a god with a taste for those old theatre standards: wine, women and song, but he wasn’t above the occasional barehanded evisceration, followed by a little filicide. Just ask the titular women of The Bacchae: Dionysus throws a wild party.

Headlining its fourth Old School Festival with a standard from that oldest of old schools, Mob Hit Productions is continuing its annual tradition of putting modern spins on traditional works. First produced at the original theatre festival — the Dionysia — Euripides’s The Bacchae is the story of Dionysus’s followers, the men who try to stop them and the nasty results of their misadventure. With Thebes’s noblewomen running wild in the hills, dismembering animals, and King Pentheus (John Knight) deciding to play detective, the play ends after a case of mistaken identity leaves the good king torn limb from limb. From that cheery tale, Mob Hit artistic producer Lawrence Leong has drawn a parallel to a modern form of worship: celebrity.

“For me, that was the catalyst of the piece, trying to capture what it is to worship in a modern sense, and one that kind of captures the sense of Dionysian worship,” he explains.

With a permanent chip on his shoulder, courtesy of his father Zeus and the Theban nobility’s contempt for his mother, Dionysus (Mitchell Verigin) is a perfect diva-like example of petulance and excess — a Hellenic rock star all the way. Add reckless women partying, and wine flowing like water, it’s easy to suggest that Euripides answered the call for hip hop music video cliché 3,000 years before MTV put it out, complete with singing and dancing.

Before we knew the Greek chorus as a line of sombre-faced men chanting, the term chorus meant a place for dancing. In Mob Hit’s Bacchae, that tradition returns, with choreography, singing in the form of six choral odes and a smattering of sung dialogue.

“It’s amazing when it works,” says Leong. “These choral odes come from the dithyramb, this singing and storytelling that predates Greek theatre. Most of [the chorus’s text], but especially the acting, would have been sung.”

“I’m not sure if Kenneth McLeish’s translation was meant to be sung,” he adds, “but it definitely fits.”

Not content to stop at choral odes, this year’s festival also includes the Sounds of Summer music series, featuring The Matt Blais Connection, Trainspear and Rock, Paper, Safety Scissors. Sweet Silence, which saw local DJs composing new soundtracks for classic silent films in past festivals, is no more, but the Old School Dance Party has risen in its place. Rather than being shackled to a particular film, the night’s three DJs have been invited to include videos that mean “old school” to them. This year’s incarnation, says Leong, is meant to put the focus on local DJs, rather than their old-school material.

“We’re working with emerging artists and celebrating classic works,” he says. “[Old school] can be a very vague term, but that’s not a bad thing. The results we’re getting are really diverse, which is great.”

For Leong, the idea of adapting works — from the festival’s central production to its DJs — is exciting, but also causes special difficulties. As anyone who’s ever seen a mangled production of Shakespeare shoehorned into a too-clever concept can attest, modernizing a work requires more than updated costuming and flashy set pieces. There’s a balancing act between the quality of the original and the need to bridge the years for a modern production. It’s a balance Leong remains conscious of.

“The biggest danger, as with any theatre work, is being boring or uninteresting,” he says. “The other thing we do have a risk of, especially with the theatre, is being disrespectful of the tradition you’re putting up. There are certainly things that could be stretched and manipulated, but there’s a structure that if you break it you’re not doing that work anymore.”