Bacchai

Judged purely as an aesthetic experience, Peter Hall's production of Euripides' Bacchai in the Olivier is enthralling. Movement, music, lighting, design all work together in perfect harmony. But if I was impressed rather than moved, it is because Hall's adherence to the mask means that art triumphs over life, form over content.

The paradox is that Euripides' play, not least in Colin Teevan's new translation, is the most human of Greek tragedies. True, it puts on stage a god in the shape of Dionysus. But, in essence, it dramatises a battle between antithetical forces: rigidity, repression and control as embodied by the Theban king, Pentheus, and violence, ecstasy and sexuality as represented by Dionysus. By a supreme irony, Pentheus is destroyed by the very qualities he denies.

You can see the play in many ways; ER Dodds put it best when he said it demonstrates "that we ignore at our peril the demand of the human spirit for Dionysiac experiences". But, in Hall's hands, it becomes a conscious dramatic ritual from the first moment when Greg Hicks advances on to the empty stage and dons the golden mask of the god. The use of masks enables three actors to play all the principal roles so that William Houston moves from a buttoned-up Pentheus to his murderous mother Agave. And the 15-strong chorus, made up of both men and women, become a unified, androgynous force.

As theatrical art, it is highly impressive. The burning of Pentheus's palace is evoked, in Alison Chitty's design, through the splintering of the Olivier stage to reveal a wall of flame. And, at the end, the spirit of Dionysus magically rises from the mutilated remains of Pentheus's body. But for me the masks diminish the drama's human emotion. Pentheus should be flurried, irascible, excited: the mask, however, turns him into a totalitarian stereotype.

Hall offers sophisticated arguments to justify masks: in reality they deny the expressive contradictions of the human face and lend the chorus, in particular, a strangely ventriloquial air. But, even if the result is stylised tragedy, the three principals perform with great skill. Hicks's Dionysus is an extraordinary ambisextrous figure whose sinuous body movements perfectly match his vocal suppleness. David Ryall is briskly down to earth as both Cadmus and a herdsman and William Houston skilfully brings out the suppressed femininity of the poker- backed Pentheus.

But although Teevan's translation Keatsianly tells us that "beauty is truth and truth beauty", Hall's production sacrifices raw power to formal purity.

In rep until June 12. Box office: 020-7452 3000.

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