Read all about it! Girl Power/Sex Strike – Athenian Bookies Put Nookies @ 300/1 – Bar.
A week previous to this performance America and beyond witnessed unprecedented scenes of mass protest in which women were the principal protagonists.
Voicing, in their view, a collective outrage of antipathy towards the inauguration of mysoginist Donald Trump as Resident Evil to The White House. His perceived rivers of effluent speeches building walls not bridges and, not least his ‘off-mic/off-his pants’ lewd braggadocio, lends this production’s context a prescient insistentcy.
Juxtaposed alongside this post-truth alternative reality Lysistrata’s Athenian warrior menfolk are confronted with some discomforting alternative facts.
Distraught and helpless as the death-toll mounts in the interminable Peloponnesian Wars with Sparta, the good women of Athens kick up one hell of an Acropolis row declaring no more sex in the city. This nookie embargo is celebrated with saucy relish in The Attic Collective’s debut, premier farrago of surrealist inversion of power and authority. Aristophanes’ fifth century BC anti-war comedy of leg-trembling confusion anticipated the Vietnam protest slogans ‘Make Love/Not War’. Not so much, ‘Not in my name.’ More so, ‘Not in my bed.’
Thus, in the spirit of the original Aristophanes via Carry On Devil may care smutty and mucky innuendo, this energetic ensemble of shoot-from-the-lip iconoclasts predicate their muse with the ethos of: what ever is saucy enough to goose your grandma is game on. The ruder, riper and gamier the better – with menacing chaotic erotica.
Daring derring-do you want some, in the face experimental, they are not to be gainsaid by eshewing a hefty handful of inflated phalli. Pathetic fallacy writ large. Indeed, by the gland full and then some. Excitable, frenetic, playing scandalously knicker-loose with the text (Trump and Bounder Boris get a curdling cameo of distain) Director, Susan Worsfold, allows the cast a broad and bawdy canvas to splatter the racy dialogue and tribal chorus chants with abandon. The use of auto-tune/vocoder effects is less convincing, lending a Euro-Pop tacky incongruity.
Ballsy, blousey, burlesque – with more than a naughty nuance of Aubrey Beardsley slinky, kinky delinquent decadence, The Attic Collective are lithesomely hunky, funky and decidedly spunky.
Cait Irvine as the eponymous heroine is viperously vixen and schemingly feral in her purpose exploiting the luxuriously golden cartouche set design to announce her denouement ultimatum to the priapically challenged envoys of Athens and Sparta. Base, crude and lewd The Attic Collective may be playing their zeitgeist cards just right. Trumps notwithstanding. This cock-sure, frisky risqué and irreverent schlock-bluster debuts on the same day that The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist pushed forward ‘The Doomsday Clock two minutes & thirty seconds closer to midnight. But a mile or so away from this theatre, almost 100 years ago, a young soildier recovering at Craiglockhart would begin drafting a poem – Dulce Et Decorum Est.
http://www.edtheatres.com/lysistrata
Photos Greg Macvean t 07971 826 457
I didn’t like it, mostly because it was very inarticulate. You could hardly understand any words the actors were saying. Because i know the play and know the story line though it was easy enough for me to follow. Also, the choreography looked messy. The women were abusive rather than the ore reasonable voices one can bring across from Aristophanes words, and his were better peacemakers than I felt these women were. The phalluses were true to ancient Greek comedy, and I saw nothing ‘Beardsleyesque’ about it at all. I didn’t like the way Lysistrata’s monologue was cheapened by cutting it down and giving such an important monologue – the highlight of the play, such little importance. Aristophanes wrote brilliantly – hard to top – so why change his words into something very amateurish? I’ve seen better high school productions.
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