Which translation did you use I asked naively because I assumed that none of the team could read Greek.  ‘There are so many …they are all so different, so we used a bit from each of them’ was the response.

What was immediately notable was the magnificent orchestration by writer, director, designer  Don Fex who  kept the 15 talented cast members moving at a ferocious rate, constantly working at a high level of performance plus  the general quality of their acting along-side Steph Goodwin’s Athenian heroine  Lysistrata, all set to lead the women into an angry attempt to do a away with the absurdity of war.   Despite the 1950’s setting, and a lot of colourful contemporary vocabulary, the show never strayed from the essential meaning of Aristophanes work, or at least the way we have come understand it.  A feat of near brilliance on the part of this director who has a definite talent for comedy and who obviously did some very serious work adapting the available English language translations to the theatrical space at the Gladstone theatre.

Aristophanes’ erotic, playfully serious anti-war creation,  was  first produced in 411 BC, but the  universal theme of this work has allowed it to easily withstand the test of  time and certainly no serious theatre company would dare call itself professional if it did not try to produce this work at least once in its lifetime. The fact it still has such an impact on artists of the stage and their audiences, was very clear last night at the Gladstone.  The howls rose as the proud, self-assured bombshell style blond ,  this  1 950s Lysistrata came slinking in, calling her female troupe to assemble before her while batting her eyelashes, and giving all the men the most powerfully mixed messages of sex, anger and defiance. The poor males went into a state of shock.    …

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