'Derek Mahon's Bacchae, like Euripides' play, moves speedily through a dazzling and bewildering display of tone, rhythm and feeling. From Dionysus' slangy craftiness in the prologue to the despairing grief of Agave and Cadmus at the end of the play the audience is forced constantly to shift and readjust its point of view. The result is a kind of ethical and emotional vertigo where the boundaries blur between laughter and anguish, reason and illusion, speech and song, kindness and cruelty.

'The resulting disorientation makes familiar territory strange and dangerous. Mahon's great achievement in this transformation emerges most strikingly in the beauty of his choral odes whose clarity and grace linger hauntingly over the scenes of human folly and divine anger.'
                      — Rachel Kitzinger, Vassar College