Greek classical tragedies get a reasonable exposure as part of the classic theatrical canon with productions of the Oresteia, the Oedipus plays and Electra cropping up fairly frequently but when did you last get to see an Athenian comedy?
OK, so maybe Lysistrata, Aristophanes’ anti-war play about a sex strike (and there’s a production of that by Greek director Anastasia Revi coming up next month at Riverside Studios). If you are lucky (and have lived long enough) you may have seen productions of The Birds at The Scoop, the National or at Camden Lock or even a swimming pool production of Stephen Sondheim’s treatment of The Frogs, but I bet you haven’t seen The Knights, Women in Assembly or Plutus.
George Eugeniou of Camden Town’s Theatro Technis is going to give you the chance. He is presenting a cycle of five of Aristophanes’ great political satires.
He kicks off with a three-week run of The Knights, opening next Tuesday 26 February in his own musical adaptation under the title O, Democracy! The others will follow together with Frogs and another Lysistrata.
Theatro Technis (Greek for Arts Theatre) was founded by Eugeniou and others in Camden in 1957 and he has been running it ever since. At first it served the many Greeks and Greek Cypriots in the area as both arts centre and community focus but it has always attracted a much wider theatre audience and has in recent years increasingly hosted international companies from Spain, Japan and the USA as well as other British companies and its own productions.
George is still as indefatigable as ever. He recently played Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonnos as part of the Oedipus cycle. He even gave us a taste of what it must have sounded like originally for he played his role in ancient Greek in an otherwise English language production.
Now he is giving us a very contemporary take on a satire that was first performed at the Athens Linaea Festival in 424 BC in the middle of the Peloponnesian war. Aristophanes’ attack on the demagogues who were manipulating democracy for their own ends in Athens won him first prize. It will be interesting to see whether it still keeps its bite.
More information: www.theatrotechnis.com/history.php