Make cakes, not war

I've been remiss in blogging the annual UCL and King's Classics Plays this year. Both were enjoyable.

UCL put on Aristophanes' Lysistrata, for the third time in twelve years. Well, it's a good play, with much to laugh at. I saw it on the first performance, and there was clearly a degree of nervousness in the cast. This was particularly apparent in the actress playing Lysistrata (admittedly, a big, tough role to play). But it clearly was just nerves, and the cast was noticeably more confident after the interval. I'm sure they got better as the run progressed. The Cinesias/Myrrhine scene was well done, always a touchstone of the quality of a production. Setting the whole thing in the Peninsular War was interesting, though the idea wasn't taken much further than as a source for costume design. And whilst I am in principle against retaining the references to Aristophanes' contemporaries that mean nothing to a modern audience, this cast did at least manage to convey the impression that such references meant something to them.

I've been quite lukewarm about recent King's productions, feeling that they often looked under-rehearsed. Last year, I was picked up on this, with a commenter arguing that I was expecting too much of the productions. Well, there's probably some truth, but I do think it's important to say when one thought things could have been better. And they can, as this year's play showed. Because it was clear in the performance I saw that King's have considerably upped their game. Georgia Crick Collins as Helen, Ben Donaldson as Menelaus and Anna Perfitt as Theonoe were particularly good, all managing to act rather than just recite. Donaldson in particular gave the audience a Menelaus who retains his nobility, and is not just an idiot, as can sometimes be the case in this play. And the idea of using the Chorus to enact scenes being recounted, tried out last year in Persians, worked really well this year. The best King's Play I've seen since Rhesus in 2005.

But this isn't the production I want to praise most in this entry. Last night I went to see a production of Lysistrata, given by students of Kidbrooke School. I confess that I hadn't gone expecting much, but it was stunningly good, and I laughed more than I have at an Aristophanes production for a few years; it's certainly the best of the three Lysistratas I've seen in the last twelve months (the other being an Actors of Dionysus production). The whole thing was done as a cross-dressing romp, with most of the female parts played by boys, and the male ones by girls. It's actually quite encouraging that a bunch of teenage boys are willing to dress up in women's clothing and camp it up in front of their mates.

The text used was Laurence Houseman's 1911 version (Houseman was the brother of A.E. Houseman, a gay man when that was very illegal, and a supporter of the Suffragette movement). That might not seem to be the best idea to get the humour of the original out, and indeed, there are few actual laughs in the text, which, unsurprisingly, eliminates a lot of the filth from Aristophanes's text. But the humour and some of the filth are put back by the production, costumes and performances of the cast, as well as a fair bit of political engagement.

What I think makes this production work is an understanding that Lysistrata is not a play about sex, or women's rights, but about war. This is underlined at the beginning, in the introduction of a bloodied figure of Peace (in place of Reconciliation), and in an end which ought to be hackneyed, but is in fact astonishing.

As far as I know, this production has not come out of Classical outreach initiatives, and it is extremely heartening that people still turn unprompted to Greek drama. I would be pleased by this production just for that reason. The bonus on the cake is how good it is. I often find myself feeling that I have become an old cynic, and am far too difficult to impress these days. And then something like this comes along, and just blows me away with what can be achieved.

It's still on this evening and tomorrow. If you have a chance, I urge you to see it.

KCL and UCL Greek Plays 2010

Aeschylus, Persians
2010 King’s Greek Play, Greenwood Theatre
Performance seen: 11 February 2010

It is, as the programme notes, quite surprising that the King's Greek Play has never tackled Aeschylus' Persians before. It's a regularly studied text, because of its uniqueness as the only surviving tragedy based on historical events (indeed, events within the lifetime of the audience, featuring onstage depiction of at least one person who was still alive when the play premiered in 472 BCE). So this year, King's took on the challenge of that work.

As is often the case with King's productions, it was okay, though nothing that enormously impressed me. One potential problem with Persians is that it can end up looking very static, and in fairness, this was well-dealt with. The Chorus was used to add movement, and to underline the dialogue through their actions. There are some nods towards tradition, notably in the half-masks worn by the cast.

Other aspects were less successful. Breaking the Messenger down into two roles was innovative, but I thought they were rather aggressive towards Atossa, who is, after all, supposed to be their Queen. And having Xerxes come on stage dressed a bloodied armed soldier misses Aeschylus' point, which is made pretty explicitly in the text: Xerxes has run away from the fight before actually seeing combat, has torn his own rich oriental dress, as a woman would do, and has nothing manly about him at all.

The best performer was Petros Boutros-Vallinatos as Darius, who confidently delivered his dialogue. Charlotte Maskell as Atossa, the Persian Queen, was rather more muted, though hers is the largest part, and therefore the hardest to learn in Greek.

As with last year's Lysistrata one felt that a little more rehearsal was needed. Atossa forgot some of her lines, the Chorus were not always in unison, and the surtitles were often badly out of sync with what was actually being said. But, as ever, one must make allowances for student productions - these are not professionals, and delivering a play in a language that is not your own is difficult.

Aeschylus' Oresteia Parts II and III: Choephori and Eumenides
2010 UCL Greek and Latin Classical Play, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre
Performance seen: 12 February 2010

I would extend the same allowances to the UCL Classical Play, if they ever showed any sign of needing them. Not every UCL production is first-rate - Acharnians in 2007 was a bit weak - but it's been a long time since there was a terrible production, and more often than not, the UCL productions get it right. Of course, they do have some advantages. The need to deliver the text in Greek restricts the pool of performers from which King's can draw - UCL, in contrast, can throw a wider net, which brings in people with considerable experience of the amateur, and in some cases professional, stage. And the benefits show. (Tonight I'm off to see a performance by King's students in English, which may be a fairer comparison.)

Following on from the successful Agamemnon of 2008, in 2010 UCL decided to stage the remaining two plays from the Oresteia trilogy. The burden was eased by giving the two plays to different directors.* This ambitious scheme pays off.

Despite featuring the killing of Clytemnestra, Choephori can easily get slightly lost as the middle play, between Agamemnon and Eumenides. This production brings it into focus. Where Lisa Gosbee's Agamemnon had used masks, here she takes a more naturalistic approach (though still not entirely naturalistic). Highlights of this were the opening entrance of the Chorus, to the sound of a single clear, beautiful voice, and a strong Electra. (Though unfortunately there were a couple of times when members of the Chorus forgot their lines.)

Eumenides was done very differently, in a far more stylized approach. The ghost of Clytemnestra is projected on a screen. The Furies are whiteface goths in tutus. But it works, and doesn't jar with the approach in Choephori. I might have hoped for a more menacing Athena when she speaks to the Furies (underneath Athena's consoling words, I always feel, is an implicit message that in any fight, Athena will not be the loser), but that's a personal bee in my bonnet.

Overall then, two different, complementary and both well-done plays from UCL. I look forward to next year's performance.

* Unfortunately, I have mislaid my programme, so can give no names. I will rectify this as soon as I can.

2008 University of London Festival of Greek Drama

The University of London’s Festival of Greek Drama has been going on since 1987, and acts as an umbrella for the King’s and UCL Greek plays, as well as lectures and, sometimes, other productions. This year it has afforded the opportunity to see three tragedies in three weeks, representing the three main Athenian tragedians. So I’ve chosen to blog them all in a single entry, rather than separately

Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus

2008 King’s Greek Play, Greenwood Theatre

Performance seen: 6 February 2008

I had once evolved a theory that student/youth theatre groups couldn’t really do Greek tragedy (and yes, I know I start every discussion of a student production with this theory). Recent productions of Orestes and Medea have persuaded me that this judgement was in error. I realized that it was based on a couple of dreadful productions of the Oedipus Tyrannos (one of which you can read about here), and a couple of ropey Antigones. Against that, I’ve seen some not-too-bad productions of Trachiniae, and one of Ajax which I recall being okay, though it was nearly thirty years ago and I had little to judge it against at the time. So perhaps it is not even that youngsters can’t do Sophocles, but that they can’t do the Theban plays.

Of course, it’s not just students that this affects. The status of the Oedipus as the recognized foremost example of Attic tragedy means it is the first choice of any theatre company wishing to demonstrate that they can tackle the genre, and therefore where many prove they can’t. Not for nothing did the makers of The Band Wagon choose Oedipus Rex when they wanted to poke fun at the dreariest, most portentous production of a play imaginable.

Unfortunately, the 2008 King’s production does little to convince me to change my mind on this point. It’s not that it’s particularly bad, though there are a couple of elements that I really don’t care for. It more that the individual bits of the staging don’t hang together as a whole, and everyone seems to be in a different production to everyone else.

At one end is Bryan Kitch (Oedipus), who gives a nuanced performance. If he is a little muted at times, that’s at least partly because the rest of the cast give him so little to work with, the one exception being Eleanor Hanham as Jocasta, who, after a bit of gurning, finally hits the right emotional note in the last lines before she leaves the stage. Oedipus and Creon are costumed alike, in silk pyjamas and floor-length tunics that are open at the front and expose a lot of bare chest (so nothing slashy there, then), but the difference in tone between Kitch’s performance and Miles Galaska’s as Creon is quite jarring.

At the other extreme is Simon Willshire, as the Priest. His performance is the sort of amateur dramatics that is often parodied, being all about reciting the lines, but with no investment of emotion in the performance.

Then there’s the Chorus. When they first enter, the people sitting next to me are suppressing their giggles. I was at first annoyed at the gigglers, but after a moment I could see their point. The Chorus here are like a parody of the worst excesses of nineteen-seventies arty theatre workshop formalistic interpretive dance expressionism and Significance, all black-clad, Meaningful Looks and exaggerated Expressive Movements. Only Charlotte Murrie, Deianeira in last year’s Women of Trachis, is memorable. She has sufficient stage presence to always draw one’s attention.

But even the worst Oedipus often has some good ideas. The National Youth Theatre ended with a festal scene, reminding the audience that Oedipus’ banishment lifts Apollo’s curse from Thebes. A UCL production concluded with Oedipus crouched at the front of the stage, but lit from the footlights, so that he cast a far larger shadow on the backdrop than the elders of Thebes, symbolizing the shadow Oedipus’ legacy will cast over Thebes’ future.

Here the neat idea is that every time someone recounts prophecy, they do so in song. That’s certainly an interesting notion. Modern productions always have a problem with the role of music in Greek theatre, because modern musical theatre is not generally associated with tragic themes, unless it’s full-blown opera. So credit to King’s for trying that. But it’s one of a number of ideas that don’t quite come off. Another is casting women as the shepherds - it is a little jarring when the Theban old man is neither aged in appearance nor a man.

On the other hand, the production can’t be blamed for the failure of the stage hangings to collapse as they should have; ending on the distraught Oedipus and cutting the final Chorus is probably the right thing to do (though I doubt King’s are the first to do that); and it’s nice to see surtitles back (even if sometimes moderately lengthy speeches are reduced to a handful of words).

I should emphasize, as I usually do, that I know these are not professional actors and director, so it is unfair to hold them to professional production standards. And I did see this on the first performance, so it may have improved over the next two nights. (And my opinion is not shared by everyone.) But in general, student productions can, and should be, better than this.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

2008 UCL Classical Play, Bloomsbury Theatre

Performance seen: 12 February 2008

To demonstrate my point, I need look no further than this year’s UCL play. Again I saw this on the first night, but where King’s had yet to form a coherent whole out of disparate parts, UCL hit the ground running. Well, it’s more like a gentle stroll, but at least they know where they’re going.

I’m slightly surprised that UCL have returned to the Agamemnon so soon. Their last, not too bad, staging of it was in 2002, and in between they have only staged one tragedy, Medea. The corpus of Greek drama isn’t that small.

The first thing one notices, as the Chorus enters whilst the audience settles, is that the production is masked. This is a risky strategy, which can come off, but doesn’t always. The UCL Oedipus in 2000 was masked, and that was awful.

But here the masks work. They give anonymity, and uniformity to the Chorus. Members of the Chorus can play the Watchman in the first half, and Agamemnon in the second, and the switch of the cast can be done invisibly in the interval.

I wonder if the masks also allow the cast to leave their own personas behind, and project themselves into their roles more. Certainly, this production is full of good performances. The Chorus enunciate clearly, and perform well. Minor criticisms can be made - Luke Davies as the Watchman may be a bit quiet, Hugh Viney as Agamemnon a bit wooden, and Sam Smullen’s Herald weakest of all (oddly, as he has the most stage experience). But none of these are bad, and on the other hand, there are two staggeringly good performances. Mimi Kroll as an ebullient Clytemnestra has presence that dominates the whole theatre. And Jessica Lazar as Cassandra gives a portrayal largely lacking the sort of psychobabble that mars many interpretations. She does strip down to her underwear, but at least there’s a justification of that in the text.

Which brings me to Jamal Saleh’s new translation. It’s really quite good. The language owes much to Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and manages to be both comprehensible and bring a nobility to what is said. It does tend to be a bit prolix, which emphasizes that Aeschylus’ individual scenes are a somewhat overlong. This, combined with a hesitancy on the part of some cast members in delivering their lines, drags things out rather, so that it took over two hours, including interval, to get through what is not actually a very long play in relative terms. The credit for a script editor suggests that some judicious cutting took place. A little more wouldn’t have gone amiss.

All this - the masks, the Chorus speaking for the most part one at a time, the language, even the net motif on the stage dressing, foreshadowing Agamemnon’s death - shows a production that is very traditional in its approach. It reminds me strongly of Sir Peter Hall’s 1981 version of Tony Harrison’s translation, almost as if it was influenced by that. The Hall/Harrison version was staged before most of the cast and crew were born, but I wonder if they had access to a recording of it.

Very occasionally the traditionalism doesn’t work. Rolling the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra out on the ekklema was powerful in Hall’s production, because it was in the centre of the stage - here it’s to the side, and easily missed. But overall, there’s nothing wrong with a traditional approach done well, and that is what we have here. It may not be as good as the Medea of 2006, but it’s clearly better than 90% of student/youth productions, and superior to quite a few more lauded professional productions (such as the NT’s Trojan Women).

Since 2006 UCL’s productions have been under the aegis of a Classical Drama Society. I find myself wondering if such a formalized set-up would benefit King’s. Admittedly, last year’s King’s play, though flawed, was better than UCL’s Acharnians. But King’s has never in my experience delivered anything as good as this or the 2006 Medea.

Euripides, Bacchae

Royal Holloway Classics Students, Jane Holloway Hall

Performance seen: 22 February 2008

At the very least one has to admire the Royal Holloway students’ courage in tackling Bacchae so soon after the memorable Alan Cumming production. Wisely, they don’t take the National Theatre of Scotland version on directly. For a start, the pyrotechnics of the latter are wholly impractical for RHUL.

Instead, they apply a series of solutions that are often diametrically opposite to those taken by John Tiffany. This may or may not be deliberate. For a start, instead of visual stimulation they go for an aural approach, with an effective music score underlying the action.

At the centre of the play is the ambiguous figure of Dionysus, existing in a zone of indeterminate gender. The National Theatre of Scotland dealt with this by casting an androgynous man, and have him act effeminately. RHUL cast an androgynous woman and have her act like a man. This is a splendid performance by Madeleine Taylor, the best thing about this production. She is confident and commands the stage.

Emphasizing Dionysus’ masculinity allows Pentheus to be rather more camp, which at least makes more readily explicable his willingness to dress in women’s clothing. My companion on the night felt that the male members of the cast shouted, whilst the women rushed, suggesting a degree of nervousness, though I myself thought that nobody was actually bad, and Mirjam Frank as Agave conveyed her madness without making it seem laughable.

This is the most ‘cheap-and-cheerful’ of the three productions. Royal Holloway do not have the same tradition of mounting Greek plays, and where King’s and UCL play in mostly full theatres, RHUL has a half-empty sports hall. That the hall was half-empty is a shame.

It sounds patronizing to say that this has the feel of a school play, but what I mean by that is the sense of enthusiasm undimmed by a recognition on the players’ part that they aren’t the most professional cast in the world. It would be fair to say that this is quite a conservative production, with the cast in Grecian dress, and a three-person Chorus that stands and recites rather than moves. But there’s nothing wrong with a conservative production done well, as this is. If the humour of the play is rather lost, the deus ex machina is not marred, as Cumming’s was, by divine petulance (and RHUL recognize that Dionysus in his full godhood requires a costume change). This wasn’t the best production of Euripides that I’ve seen, but at least I didn’t come out thinking ‘What was the point of that?’

2006 UCL Classics Play

Euripides, Medea, UCL Classical Drama Society, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre

Performance seen: 11th February 2006

I have long harboured the view that, on the whole, student and youth theatre doesn't do well with Greek tragedy, a viewed formed by some truly awful stagings of Oedipus Rex I was subjected to around the turn of the century. Recent productions seem determined to strip me of my prejudices. First there was Oxford's excellent Orestes. And now along comes Graham Kirby's self-assured production of Medea, under the auspices of the newly-formed UCL Classical Drama Society.

Kirby's production design is simple, yet subtle and effective. A bare room is suggested with a couple of walls and some minimal furniture. An architrave shows scenes from Jason's legend, such as the battle with the Hydra, or the murder of Pelias. Clever lighting contributes to the mood.

Kirby has provided a new translation of the play. One presumes, given the pedigree of the production, that it is true to the Greek (bar reasonable additions such as including the name of Creon's daughter, Glauke, which does not feature in Euripides' text). More importantly, it is an excellent piece of English writing. The lines flow with poetry, and one hopes that Kirby will be able to make this translation available for others to stage.

But of course a production of Medea must stand and fall on the central performance. Here the there is a pure treat, as Dena Arya is incandescent as Medea. From the moment the play opens, as she stands with her back to the audience, bewailing her fate in Greek (only when she switches to English does she show her face), it is clear that something interesting is about to happen. Clad in black slip, housecoat and boots, she is a classic 1970s bitch, such as the likes of Kate O'Mara, Faye Dunaway and Glenda Jackson have built careers on, the sort of fascinating woman that an audience should abhor, but will find themselves rooting for. This is exactly how Medea should be (it is, after all, this very quality that sucks the Chorus into its complicity with her). Arya is careful never to go over the top - she is passionate, but always believable. And she is always worth watching, even when someone else is involved in a long speech, whether it be the killing looks thrown Jason's way, or the almost sexual enjoyment she takes in hearing the fates of Glauke and Creon. Bar a short clip on The Late Show, I was not fortunate enough to see Diana Rigg's performance in 1993/94, which Kirby takes as the gold standard for the role. But I can say that Arya's is one of the best Medeas that I have seen, and definitely better than Fiona Shaw's boggle-eyed interpretation from 2001. Her final departure (perhaps the only deus ex machina in Euripidean tragedy that makes perfect sense) is presented as apotheosis, a notion I first saw in Phylidda Lloyd's 1991 production at Manchester's Royal Exchange.

It is hardly a slight to say that none of the rest of the cast quite measure up to Arya. But, after taking a while to warm up in the role, Adam Greves as Jason very nearly gives as good as he gets. Certainly, his performance underlines the fact that, for all his apparent reasonableness and rationality, Jason is an arse of the highest order. His arguments that he has chosen to marry again out of a desire to protect Medea and her children are so transparently self-serving and specious that it is almost unnecessary for Medea to tear them to shreds.

The other performance that deserves noting is Laurie Wilks as the Nurse. Kirby warns in his foreword to the programme that "elements of what might be called 'camp' have crept in", and so the audience is presented with a cross-dressing nurse, played by a man in woman's clothing, with the Tutor played by a woman dressed as a man. It shouldn't work. But it does, because Wilks imposes himself on the role with such utter conviction that the audience has no choice but to suspend any disbelief. All trace of camp are utterly banished, along with any inappropriate humour. The cross-dressing is exploited for one joke, but that is left to the curtain call.

The more naturalistic a production of Greek tragedy is, the more problematic the Chorus can be. In this staging, the Chorus are clad in black leotards and strips of white gauze. They enter masked, and periodically over the rest of the play they remove and replace their masks. Presumably there was meant to be a pattern to that, but I'm afraid I couldn't quite work out why. Yet, just when I was about to write off the Chorus as an element of the production that didn't quite work, that they didn't quite react enough to the events they were observing, suddenly the choreography gave real power to the way the actual (offstage) infanticide was played out. And I should add that my partner, whilst thinking that the Chorus could have looked better, was much more impressed by them than I was, considereding their speech and choreography to have been excelelnt throughout.

One might find a few elements to suggest didn't work. It might not have been necessary to underline the Messengers' account of Creon and Glauke's deaths with a mime of it from the actors, though other productions in the past (such as the Royal Exchange one mentioned above) have thought that it was. And the costumes of the Messengers, as typical Cockney barrow boys a la My Fair Lady might be considered a bit odd.

But then one thinks of Arya's performance or Kirby's translation, and nothing much else matters. Perhaps it's only the Oedipus Rex that students can't do. I await being proved wrong on that score with interest.

UCL Greek Play: Aristophanes' Knights

Performance seen: 02/03/05.

Where King's College London traditionally stages a play in the original Greek every year, the students of University College London make their contribution to the London Festival of Greek Drama by presenting a play in English translation. This year they presented Aristophanes' Knights.

The choice of this play presents some intrinsic problems for any production. Aristophanes later plays, such as Lysistrata or The Birds, are gifts to a producer, full of such comic situations that half a production's job is already done. Knights is different. It's ... well, a bit dull, to be honest. The second earliest surviving play of Aristophanes, and the first he presented under his own name, Knights appears to have been done on the cheap, with the bare minimum of non-speaking extras and costume changes for its three actors. This means that an awful lot of the play is just two men, Paphlagon (meant to represent the Athenian politician Cleon) and Agorakritos, the sausage seller, shouting at each other. It certainly impressed the audience at the time, winning first prize in the dramatic festival of the Lenaia of 424 BC, but for me, at least, Aristophanes' very best work belongs to the following decade. Knights lacks the variety of incident to be found in his other comedies. The UCL production tried to overcome that, but there was still a long section early in the second act where no-one was laughing at all, and the audience’s attention seemed to have drifted. The fault here is at least in part Aristophanes' - he's just not giving the cast the sort of juicy material that we normally expect of him. (But it was also a very cold night through which the audience had struggled, and this may well have dampened their enthusiasm.)

But I can see why it was chosen. There is, despite what I've just said about the weakness of the writing, a lot of potential in Knights, and much that can be made relevant to a modern audience. It is a play about corrupt and scheming politicians pandering to the public's baser instincts, stoking public fears in order curry votes. Some of Aristophanes' lines could not be more appropriate to the week in which Tony Blair and Charles Clarke try to force through repressive anti-terrorism laws in the name of protecting the public. There is therefore much potential for a director prepared to disrespect Aristophanes' text in order to respect the spirit.

The UCL production, directed by Graham Kirby and Reema Selhi, shows its hand early. The production is labelled from the start as an 'adaptation' of Aristophanes, and a glossary included in the programme gives a definition of 'Argos' that covers both the Greek city-state and the catalogue shop. Both of these are good signs. The production follows this up. Set in the modern offices of Athens Inc., Demosthenes becomes an Essex wide boy, Nicias camp, Paphlagon an aggressive brace-wearing City broker, with a touch of David Brent about him. The Sausage-seller is cunningly transformed into a sandwich seller (oddly played by two different people in the two acts, but this does allow a more dramatic rendition of the report of the Assembly that opens the second act, with the second Sandwich Seller acting as narrator and the first speaking the words addressed to the Assembly). The Sandwich Seller gradually metamorphoses into an impersonation of Tony Blair. This cleverly undercuts one view of the play, that, for all that he out-brazens Paphlagon, the Sausage-Seller is at heart someone who will restore the state to its former virtuous state; the Blairite Sandwich Seller is just as corrupt and unscrupulous, and distinguished from Paphlagon merely by being more clever.

Another innovation in the adaptation is to find a few more things for Demosthenes and Nicias to do later in the play. This at least slightly conceals a feature of Aristophanic comedy, the sudden disappearance of supposedly important characters from the plot, as the actors are required to play different roles.

Another Aristophanic convention is the appearance of a naked non-speaking female (or more than one) who is a gift to one (or more) of the principal characters. This is all very well when said naked girl is played by a man in a padded suit. But under the more naturalistic conventions of the modern western theatre, even when sufficiently clothed to maintain public decency, a casual sexism can enter through the usual half-naked woman. Casting a female as Demos allowed a half-naked male to appear as a peace treaty, which avoids this. (I noted that one of the directors had appeared in 2004's UCL Lysistrata as Reconciliation, the equivalent role.)

I appreciated the boldness of the approach to the adaptation, and only wish it could have been bolder still. I'd have liked to have seen more fifth-century references excised and replaced by modern allusions (although in fairness a performance in the London Festival of Greek Drama has the knowledge that its audience will mostly be students or other people with a Classical background, so greater familiarity can be assumed). I did have a slight feeling that the directors were a little lacking in confidence in what they. Perhaps indicative of this is the retention of Alan Sommerstein's Penguin translation for the Choruses. It's fine verse, but the difference between that and the modernized adaptation of the rest of the text acts as a distancing device between the Chorus and the audience, where in much Old Comedy (especially Knights), the one is supposed to identify with the other.

Some of the principal performers were a little on the quiet side. This was especially apparent when they had to compete with a slightly over-loud music track. (But I can’t fault the choice of The Beatles' 'Revolution' as pre-performance music.) This audibility problem did not affect the Chorus, who projected clearly. One member gave a memorable performance which I can only describe as Frank Finlay impersonating Laurence Olivier whilst on acid. In any case, these are not professional actors, and it is unfair to hold them to fully professional standards.

On the whole, I thought this production never quite lived up to the potential of its ideas. However, I can't deny that it showed imagination and ambition, which was a pleasant change after last year's disappointing Lysistrata, which seemed very lacking in those areas (see my review linked to from this page of the Open University's Classical Studies Greek Drama and Poetry Database Project). In theatre it is always better to aim high and miss than to aim low.