The long-abandoned print works of the Northampton Chronicle and Echo newspaper supplies an atmospheric venue for the Royal and Derngate’s gripping updating of Euripides’ gory drama The Bacchae. Returning to two plays he worked on during his student days, director Laurie Sansom employs the same talented cast in a reworking of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding in the more conventional setting of the Royal auditorium.

The pair are offered as the first contribution to what the theatre is calling its Festival of Chaos. In both — and in Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler to follow next month — can be observed the havoc wreaked by sexual passion.

In an interesting piece of casting, the same actor, Rwandan-born Ery Nzaramba, plays the author of others’ misfortunes, while another, Liam Bergin, presents both the ‘victims’.

In The Bacchae, in a new adaptation by Rosanna Lowe, Nzaramba shows us the god of wine, and so much else, as Dionysus, flaunting his philosophy of dissipated abandon in the face of Thebes’s ascetic king Pentheus. Eventually, the straitlaced ruler comes to embrace the cult and is stripped to the buff by the god before re-emerging in drag.

In Blood Wedding, as reworked by Tommy Murphy, he plays Leonardo, fatally drawn to his former girlfriend, played by Seline Hizli, even as she is celebrating her marriage to The Groom.

Intererestingly again, the same actor, Kathryn Pogson, presents the mother of each victim. In The Bacchae we see her doting on Pentheus, only to savagely slay him having lost her reason through becoming involved in Bacchus’s dangerous cult, which is led by a sassy, five-strong team of female adherents. Curiously, this central event in the play takes place out of view, though its grisly aftermath, as she begins to eat his severed head, is all too graphically presented.

In Blood Wedding, she shows us a bitter, haunted women concerned that a family feud, to which her husband and one son have already been sacrificed, is likely to rear its head again.

Both plays have been updated to the present — or rather, in the case of Blood Wedding, into the near future, Spain having, we are told, just withdrawn from the Euro.

As it happened, the press performance last Thursday coincided with a Daily Telegraph headline that spoke of Spain facing a “total emergency”.

Prophetic or what? The plays continue until June 30. Box office telephone: 01604 624811 or go to the website (www.royalandderngate.co.uk).