The Bacchae

The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre opened on 26 January 2015 with the premiere of a production of ‘The Bacchae’ by Euripides, staged by Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos and translated by Innokenty Annensky.

Euripides’s tragedy ‘The Bacchae’ is the third part of his last tetralogy. It was written in 406 BC just before his death and has remained a masterpiece of world literature and theatre ever since. It is the story of the god Dionysus who turns earthly women into bacchantes, wild creatures he uses to exact revenge. It is interwoven with motifs, which together and separately are found in dramatic art, right to the present: the clash of civilization and chaos, of reason and madness, of nature and culture.Russian readers and audiences are in a privileged position thanks to this translation by Innokenty Annensky: it is not only the work of a great poet, but also of a thinker who considers Euripides to be perhaps the most important author of the past, and someone with whom he feels in constant dialogue.In his translation of ‘The Bacchae’, Annensky was not looking for the exact verbal equivalent in Russian. He translated more freely, recreating in a different lexical setting a symbiosis of poetry, music and philosophy. It was this particular translation that Theodoros Terzopoulos chose to use for his production at The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre.