The Bacchae launches this summer's Lincoln Center Festival spectacularly. Staged as a rock opera but faithful to Euripides' ancient text, the National Theatre of Scotland's production is both a wildly entertaining tragedy and a shockingly grim comedy of sex, violence and rock-and-roll.

As Dionysus, Alan Cumming enters the blazingly white stage shackled, upside-down and bare-bottomed. With a snap of his fingers (and there is much finger-snapping, signifying both magic and street-smart approval), the handcuffs disappear and the god is revealed in all his glory, his black curls sparkling, his gold lamé kilt sexily bulging.

Dionysus is angry at Thebes for having failed to recognize him as a new god and having disrespected his mortal mother, so he has returned in human form to teach the Greeks that uninhibited sexuality cannot be denied.

Aiding his mission are his "mighty Maenads," the chorus (literally) of nine black women in red gowns and feral hair who sing and dance and electrify. Tim Sutton's music is sometimes soul, sometimes gospel, sometimes tribal, sometimes winking at pop clichés, but never succumbing to them.

Pentheus (the excellent Cal MacAninch), current ruler of Thebes, is an uptight guy whose approach is always to lock up, chain down, shut away anything that disturbs the order. There is a wonderful tiny moment when Pentheus tears a flower from its stem, one of the red poppies memorializing Dionysus' mother, and we watch a sudden flash of anger and disgust cross Cumming's face.

Unable to persuade Pentheus, Dionysus tricks him by tapping his lurid nature: Want to spy on the royal women of Thebes, already intoxicated by wine and freedom, who are performing the secret Bacchic rites in the woods? Pentheus is torn to pieces by the women, and his mother, Agave, (Paola Dionisotti) returns wild-eyed and blood-smeared, carrying his head, in the play's most famous scene.

Dionisotti has the kind of trick voice born for comedy, and her grief and horror seem to lack weight. The show's second half, in which we hear and see the results of human beings being stupid, is necessarily grimmer and duller, Dionysus having left them, and us, to learn the lesson.

The prophet Tiresias (John Bett) and Thebes' founding king, Cadmus (Ewan Hooper), appear as a pair of geriatric vaudeville hoofers in tuxes. Theater is the play's sly metaphor: The standing mike becomes the Bacchic spear, and, later, to prove the unspoken point, the whole stage goes up in flames. We are all following the scripts of our personalities and cultures, and change is the only option to destruction.

David Greig's script (from Ian Ruffell's literal translation) is full of delicious rhymes and puns ("inculcate you to my cult") and manages to make the bizarre plot make sense.

John Tiffany (who also directed last year's Black Watch for the National Theatre of Scotland) has made this Dionysian argument for losing control in a highly controlled, meticulously precise production. He seduces us, taunts us and terrifies us. Euripides, the great subversive dramatist, would likely be pleased.