Dionysus is in town! - And Pentheus, ruler of the city of Thebes, loses his head: who is this "god" to whom the people suddenly pay homage? He demands ecstatic dissolution of boundaries with the help of music and dance, dissolution of the self in intoxication. But where is the order? And above all: where are the women? They, the "Bacchae", have gone far away from the city into the entourage of the intoxicated god and celebrate, so the story goes, insane revelries... Pentheus lusts after violence and excitement: This chaos must be ended. But first the voyeur wants to see secretly what exactly the "frenzied" women are doing there...

Where there is frenetic activity, surveillance and punishment are not far away: Euripides' most famous drama revolves around this conflict, which pervades all societies. Director Philipp Preuss takes us on a delirious exploration of the eternal pair of opposites of control and intoxication: on the open-air stage in Raffelbergpark, times and spaces collide and mythological and modern heroes of knowledge meet.

Funded by: Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen im Rahmen von NEUE WEGE in Zusammenarbeit mit dem NRW KULTURsekretariat. read less