By: Crystal Kinsela
A Story the Original Play Left Off Stage
Euripides wrote The Bacchae more than two thousand years ago, and every production to date still asks the same uncomfortable question it always has. What happens when a society denies something primal in human nature until that denial turns violent? In the original text, Agave, mother of King Pentheus, tears her own son apart in a state of divine frenzy, then carries his head back to the city believing she has killed a lion. For most of the play, she exists offstage, a reported figure rather than a dramatized one. Her devastation, when it finally arrives, functions as the tragedy’s punctuation mark rather than its subject.
Jack Yearsley and collaborating artists Sook Kuan Tang, Marianna Fornari, and Oleksandra Barstok decided that omission deserved correcting. Their newly devised production, AGAVE: A BACCHAE’S TALE, moves the entire narrative weight of Euripides’ play onto Agave herself, and the production is now headed to Edinburgh following its initial development at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’s Theatre Laboratory summer showcase.
“Every myth keeps a ledger of who speaks and who is only spoken about,” Yearsley said. “In this production we wanted to finally hand Agave the pen.”
Putting the Audience Inside the Frenzy
The original Bacchae builds its tension around the ideological standoff between Pentheus, the rational king, and Dionysus, a god demanding recognition. AGAVE: A BACCHAE’S TALE sets that conflict aside almost entirely. Instead, the production currently uses a forced perspective, immersive staging approach that places the audience directly inside Agave’s experience of the myth’s central event, reframing what was once reported violence as lived psychological horror.
Tang, who co-created and first developed the piece as a scratch presentation during RADA’s annual showcase at The Coronet Theatre, brought a physical vocabulary to the production specifically focused on Agave’s lived experiences. In this respect, the show is focused on examining the physical patterning that reflects the physiological states of the characters rather than its traditional psychological narrative.
“The frenzy in this story cannot just be described,” Tang said. “It has to live in the body for the weight of the experience to reach the audience authentically.”
A Ritual, Not Just a Retelling
Part of what distinguishes AGAVE: A BACCHAE’S TALE is its treatment of the source material as something closer to ritual than reference. Yearsley has spoken often about the idea that identity sits at the center of every story worth telling, and Agave’s story, stripped of the male political conflict that usually frames it, becomes a study of a woman’s identity dismantled and reconstructed under the weight of forces she never chose.
“There is something ritualistic about storytelling that gets lost the moment we start treating a classical text like an artifact,” Yearsley said. “In this production, Agave’s story is not meant to be observed from a safe distance. It is meant to be experienced firsthand, from her perspective.”
This effort connects directly to one of Lion & Swan Productions’ central focuses, challenging conventional relationships with historical texts rather than accepting them as fixed. This production of AGAVE directs that inquiry into a story that has survived for millennia.
From RADA’s Lab Works to the Streets of Edinburgh
The production’s path to Edinburgh began modestly, as a scratch presentation at The Coronet Theatre, where early audiences responded to the piece’s structural integrity. That reception encouraged Yearsley and Tang to develop the work further, alongside fellow graduates Marianna Fornari and Oleksandra Barstok, and Lion & Swan Productions has since committed to expanding the piece into a full two-act production.
The show currently carries a content advisory for strong themes of maternal grief, violence, and loud noises, a reflection of how far the production pushes into physiological experiences that the original text only gestures toward. For audiences familiar with Greek dramas in their more conventional theatrical presentations, AGAVE: A BACCHAE’S TALE offers something considerably more visceral.
“If all the world is a stage, maybe it is time to acknowledge that some stories have been waiting in the wings to be told, in this case, two thousand years,” Yearsley said. “For us, it is Agave’s turn.”
Lion & Swan Productions is currently accepting inquiries from producers, presenters, and collaborating artists interested in the production’s Edinburgh run. More information is available through the company directly.
