Staging Aristophanes Today
Putting On Aristophanes Plays Raises Questions
The comedies of the Ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes are enjoying a comeback - but there are risks attached to their popularity.
The Return of Aristophanes
Aristophanes’ reputation is fairly high at the moment. He was once described by Victor Hugo as “the only evil and disastrous genius who ever existed” and by Charles Hastings as a playwright who “mocked at everything, even at what was good”, but in recent years he has been rehabilitated. He has also been cleared of the longstanding suspicion of having contributed to the judicial murder of Socrates by the satire in his play The Clouds, on the grounds that none of his other plays seem to have had much of an effect on Athenian politics. His play Lysistrata has been eagerly championed by a generation with a taste for drama in which war is decried and women are handed power (though this enthusiasm may be based on a misunderstanding...)
Most importantly, surely, Aristophanes is also being produced again. Having waited something like two-and-a-half thousand years before it was possible to put his flavour of “strong meat” onto the public stage again, The Frogs, The Wasps, and the Lysistrata are returning to production. Many, or even most, of these productions will be staged by or for students of ancient drama, and Aristophanes doesn’t seem to have made much headway in the West End or in repertory, but he is at least on the stage.
Why Aristophanes?
Staging Aristophanes for anything more than antique interest raises some problems, though. Enthusiasts rave about his earthy and crude humour, political involvement, and similarity to modern comedy. However this raises the awkward question: so why produce him? There may be useful parallels to be drawn between Aristophanes and cultural phenomena like Spitting Image, South Park and Private Eye, but the latter are all much funnier, which is inevitable since they were directly targeted at modern audiences.
The lowest common denominator
The wit and complexity of Aristophanes’ verse forms can only come through in the work of a skilled translator, and without the instinctive gut reactions which would have been generated by the topical Athenian allusions, we’re just left with some improbable plots driven by a tedious series of jokes about bodily functions. Critical enthusiasm for proving that the Ancient Greeks were just like us risks concentrating on the lowest common denominator – and failing to realise that we’d slate this kind of stuff if it appeared on TV, rather than having to be recovered, footnoted and funded by a university drama group.
Aristophanes offers us a glimpse into an alien world which has long been claimed as the cradle of our culture. Modern productions cannot minimise the strangeness of Athens by only noticing what seems to correspond exactly to our own time. The shocks of recognition to be had from Aristophanes’ plays require that the distance between their time and ours be respected.
