The Bacchae by Euripides is a famously unconventional and challenging play, and in their new version the Cambridge Musical Theatre Society attempts to reimagine the tale by setting it during the 2011 London riots. Combining chants, infectious drumbeat rhythms, and a large and very physical chorus, it aims to be a thought-provoking and entertaining piece of political theatre.

The original Greek tragedy is brutal and violent: Dionysus, the god of wine, ritual madness and ecstasy, seeks revenge on the house of Cadmus, of which Pentheus, King of Thebes, is the head, for the death of his human mother. This version departs from the original in many significant ways, including the omission of Dionysus from the cast.

Director Constance Chapman, reading the reviews of other recent productions of The Bacchae, was struck by how each one would say that they “‘just couldn’t capture a god’, and I was thinking, ‘What are they doing wrong?’... Actually I don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, but how can you capture a god on stage with a human actor?”

Seeing Dionysus as “a part of human nature that everyone in the chorus embodies”, the show’s creators have instead gone for a direct opposition between Pentheus and the possessed mob of rioters.

Setting this play during the 2011 riots raises once again the questions of why the riots began and how we should interpret them. One recalls how the historian David Starkey controversially said on Newsnight that the riots were the result of “a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture” – in his words, a “Jamaican patois that has intruded in England […] whites have become black”.

This production hopes to tackle such reactions head-on by incorporating text from newspaper reports, and recasting Pentheus as a David Cameron-like Prime Minister, borrowing the rhetoric of Cameron’s speeches at the time (“This is criminality pure and simple”).

The main ideas for The Bacchae came to Chapman while she was performing the play in the original Greek when the riots began: “I put two and two together.”

The chorus of Bacchants – the followers of Dionysus – in the original was too fascinating a medium to ignore. Singing songs, dancing, and performing ecstatic rituals in large numbers, the Bacchants have considerable presence onstage, and so they’re the ones “you’re going to side with, that the audience is going to really listen to.”Or at least, initially: “There’s this awful moment of realisation where you think ‘Gosh, how did I get swept up in that, how did I believe that the chorus were doing right?’”

The Bacchae’s original soundtrack is at the heart of this idea of the seductiveness of mob violence. Watching a rehearsal, I couldn’t help but tap my foot to the call-and-response chants, drumsticks, and oil drums that the cast were working with. Chapman says the score was inspired by Stomp, and Musical Director Katie Lindsay plans to incorporate dubstep too.

Dubstep is itself interesting in this context. Its origins lie in dub music and reggae, which were often powerful vehicles for protests by minorities and outsiders in Britain. Today, it is seen as a feverishly joyous form of dance music. This duality makes it the perfect choice for a production which aims to question the irrestisibility of the mob.

In The Bacchae, music and movement have an infectious power that draws in Agave, in this version the daughter of Pentheus, giving her a means of symbolically rebelling against the law and order her father stands for.

Chapman hopes to provoke a debate over how we should see the riots in the play, instead of giving us a single interpretation. She says: “I think theatre should always be a talking point, so whether you agree or don’t, you should always come away thinking, ‘Why couldn’t I agree?’, and discussing it.”

By showing both the seductive joyousness and the mortifying violence of the Bacchants, The Bacchae seeks to explore the divisive debates the riots have provoked, while at the same time asking questions about the ever-recurring tendency towards violence in human nature.

The Bacchae will be on at the ADC Theatre from 6th - 9th November
at 11pm