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Lysistrata

Debut: 3 May, 2013

Lysistrata, by Aristophanes

Staging: Elisabete Cação

Synopsis

First presented in 411 BC, in an environment of emotional and physical exhaustion due to the military and political confrontation of the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes’s Lysistrata puts on the scene family conflicts to problematize social and political conflicts. Lysistrata proposes to her companions, Calonice, Myrrhine and Lampito, to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands as a means of forcing them to conclude the war. If at first they are reluctant with the idea, they will all sign this pact over a glass of nicely smelling wine. Lysistrata’s semichoirs are complicit in this war of the sexes. Choir of old men to one side and choir of old women to the other, for most of the play, they attack each other verbally and physically, without any restrain on obscene language and gestures, with the sole intention of achieving the ideal of peace proposed by Lysistrata. The women’s sacrilege must be rebuked by male force – but their action is weak, leaving the women free to do their own “defence”. After the failed intervention of the Commissioner, who intended to subsidize military equipment with public money stored in the Acropolis, caused by the chorus of women, finally the encounter between Myrrhine and Kinesias marks the turning point for the accomplishment of peace: man and woman meet for “the thing”. At last, the arrival of both Athenians’ and Spartans’ heralds and delegates for peace dictates a utopian end to the military events. Well drunk, they finally call a truce, in a joint dance between men and women, Athenians and Spartans.