The eclecticism of the costumes is unfocused, and a cumbersome piece of revolving stage machinery resembling a sawn- off caboose clutters the action. Eugene Salleh makes a puckish Taras Bulba of Dionysus, but his voice is not sufficiently commanding. Kaboodle's other long-time actor, Paula Simms, takes two of the vitally important "messenger" roles, and her narration, especially the first account of the Bacchae at large, is clearly and characterfully done. This scene also provides the best visual moment, in which the company create a huge beast from a cow's skull and a vast red curtain, then hunt it down.Otherwise, Lee Beagley's staging and Bruce Gallup's design are disappointing by Kaboodle's previous standards. Softly spoken, he has no crude, tyrannical bluster about him, and he is drawn into his fatal female garments in a gentle swirl of reluctance and surprised pleasure. The second psychological switch is Agave's rediscovery of her former mind as the frenzy abates and the contrary face of the Dionysian rapture becomes apparent.Happily, the complexity that surrounds Pentheus is presented with nuanced care by Lee Beagley. Discovered in his spying, Pentheus is sundered by the Bacchae, his own mother claiming his head as a trophy.

The play's main conflict is therefore between this liberation and the pursed rectitude of Pentheus.It appears to be a clash of immutable elements, but Euripides' psychological subtlety lies in the way Dionysus is able to evoke a prurient interest in the activities of the women in his enemy, and so seduce him from his fixed masculinity. Dionysus, himself ambiguously gendered, is lord and liberator of women, and the rapture he engenders transports them from their appointed place into ecstasy. Though despised as a foreigner by the Theban king, Pentheus, Dionysus has captivated the women of Thebes, who, led by Pentheus' own mother Agave, are now the Bacchae, living in liquid abandon beyond the city walls. It is the story of the coming of the disreputable but potent Dionysus to Thebes, determined to prove his lineage as a son of Zeus and claim the honour due to a god.

For this, the less traditional the performance space the better. But for all the rawness at its heart, The Bacchae is in no sense a "primitive" play. Now The Library is a nice place, a cosy cup of a theatre, designed less for Bacchanalia than for Spring and Port Wine. Other venues on Kaboodle's itinerary may suit Euripides better, but interesting as it is to contemplate the startlingly different contexts of ancient Greek and modern theatre, the production does not resolve this fundamental incongruity. Euripides' The Bacchae is strong meat, literally. Its dominant image is of dismemberment, animal and then human flesh seized alive and devoured in the furthest reach of frenzy available to human kind. To see the vulnerability of real people on stage connecting with people in the audience is increasingly important because more and more we're engaging with dead people or dead situations," he says.n 'La Dolce Vita' opens at the Crucible, Sheffield (0114-276 9922) on Saturday (previews Friday), then tours to Ipswich (12-16 Mar), Worthing (19-23 Mar), Birmingham (26-30 Mar) and the Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (3-27 Apr).