In a recent terrific National Theatre production, Katie Mitchell summoned up the spirit of Euripides’s Trojan Women, with captive females dancing to the ironically exultant sound of 1940s big band music.

There might, analogously, have been an intriguing novelty to the way in which Frances Viner’s adaptation of Euripides’s most influential play is filtered through the subversive ritual of Capoeira: this Brazilian combination of African dance, combat games and music is a far cry from the Dionysiac frenzy of the stoned Bacchic women, since it involves a disciplined physicality that is supposed to help you to know yourself. Yet Euripides called for just such a balance between the cerebral and sensual.

Viner’s Bacchae, as realised in Noah Birksted-Breen’s production, is a glittering disappointment. It virtually discards Euripides’s extraordinary psychological parable, transforming it into a fascinating music/dance show and a fragmentary, politically slanted revenge drama. Set in a racist 1920s Brazil, Viner’s Dionysus figure is Besouro, an Afro-Brazilian folk-hero who made the ruling class appear silly. Played by the cool, physically imposing Daon Broni, Besouro longs to avenge the motiveless murder of his mother by the white, corrupt police chief, Greg Hicks’s vicious, slightly camp Gordilho. This sharp dresser with a taste for cocaine has a few elements of the tyrannical Pentheus but none of his transvestite, repressed gay longings.

Viner’s self-conscious script, cluttered with romantic, surreal images, reminiscent of Garcia Lorca’s poetry, scarcely advances the scanty narrative. Just how and why does Besouro escape the murderous clutches of Gordilho, entice the white-suited, Panama-hatted police chief into taking part in a capoeira and achieve his slaughter? Viner is not concerned to show, explain or justify. Euripides’s Bacchae, with its complex of emotions and desire, culminating in that ecstatic dance-revel when Agave murders her own son, is virtually excised.

I was fascinated by the strange, elegant formalities of Capoeira, with its percussive music, mimicry of aggression, acrobatic tumblings, body twistings, its hand-stands and formal dance movements, to which Hicks contributes with impressive élan. If only the text had been as gripping as those Capoeira capers.
Until 8 February (020 7503 1646).