• Lysistrata was first performed in 411 BCE, during the final years of a protracted conflict between the city states of Athens and Sparta (and their allies). It was performed for Athenians at a public theatre festival (an important religious and civic occasion attended by thousands of citizens). At the time, the war was going very badly for Athens and a few years later, in 405 BCE, they would surrender to Sparta.
• Like all Aristophanes’ plays, which belong to a subcategory of ancient Greek comedy called ‘Old Comedy’, Lysistrata has a contemporary setting directly familiar to its original audience; it refers to (and mocks) publicly familiar individuals.
• The setting of Lysistrata is particularly striking: it takes place in front of the entrance way to the Acropolis, the most sacred part of the city where (only recently for the audiences of 411 BCE) the famous Parthenon stands. Crucially for the plot, the Acropolis housed the Athenian treasury – making it strategically important for Lysistrata’s cause.
• As with Greek tragedy, no women performed in Greek comedy, including Lysistrata – all the roles, including the chorus, would have been played by men. Actors used stylised masks and costumes to help distinguish characters – this would have also lent itself to some of the sillier and physicalised humour. Male characters would have been distinguished through a comically large phallus that was barely concealed by clothing – and Lysistrata has fun with the erections that the sex-starved men of the play complain about. But such crude jokes are not exclusive to Lysistrata: a key feature of Old Comedy is this kind of humour.
• Music and chorality played major roles in the play in the original production – comic choruses were much larger (at 24) than tragic choruses, and the chorus are a central feature of the stage action.

• When staging Aristophanes, a key challenge for theatre makers is laughter: how can those staging plays like Lysistrata in the present make audiences laugh using jokes from such a different cultural and historical moment? The key is to adapt the plays, paying attention to a couple of crucial aspects of Aristophanes’ writing.
• Firstly, identify the contemporary crisis that the comedy responds to. Lysistrata and her fellow women are trying to put an end to a war that was really taking place for Aristophanes’ original audience – so what is the equivalent crisis for a contemporary audience? How can the production address a specific community?
• Secondly, make reference to specific figures familiar to the audience – contemporary audiences may not know the names of Athenian and Spartan public figures but are more likely to know their own politicians, local leaders, and community figures, which means they’re more likely to recognise a satire of such individuals.
• Thirdly, remember that Aristophanes’ humour is as crude as it is politically ruthless. Lysistrata especially is full of jokes about sex. So, the key here is to not pull your punches when it comes to either your political satire or the bawdiness of the jokes – though you might want to bear in mind your audience, particularly if you’re performing your production in a school setting!
• Remember, finally, that these comedies are open and direct with their audiences – think the theatricality of performer-audience interaction in British panto rather than the fourth wall enclosed TV sitcom.

• Where does the humour come from in a production? Are the jokes in the text, in the physical performances of the actors, or in contemporary references (ancient or modern)? What is the audience being asked to understand in order to make them laugh (e.g. do they need to know about the wars between Athens and Sparta)?
• How does a production approach gender in performance – what is the relationship between the genders of the performers and the genders of the characters they play (e.g. do performers who identify as men play characters who are women, as was the ancient Greek practice)?
• How does a production resituate the conflict that Lysistrata addresses? Does it keep the Athenian/Spartan identities for the two sides or update it to a modern equivalent (e.g. Allied and Axis powers in World War II)? Does it keep the Greek names but give visual clues to the audience to make them understand the sides as something different (e.g. the Athenians are dressed to look like Allied soldiers)?
• How does a production articulate cultural sameness and cultural difference in its staging of Athens and Sparta – in other words, how might a production render Athens as the culturally the same as the audience and how does it render Sparta as culturally different? Consider the (potential) choices made by the translator, director, designers, and performers.
• Does a production maintain, play with, reject, or otherwise disrupt Aristophanes’ binaries – men/women, Athenian/Spartan, and even peace/war?

• Aristophanes has influenced lots of later comic writers and comedians – most famously Monty Python. And while Aristophanes’ comedies themselves are not frequently performed in the modern world (or certainly performed less frequently than the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides), an Aristophanic style of comedy can be found on stage in the musical The Book of Mormon and on TV in satire like Spitting Image and the political sketches of Saturday Night Live.
• Lysistrata is one of the most performed of Aristophanes’ plays – perhaps because the situation at the centre can be more or less easily adapted to a contemporary conflict. But one of the most interesting recent adaptations has been for film: Spike Lee’s 2015 Chi-Raq recontextualises the action to modern day Chicago, highlighting gang and gun violence.
• Across the world there have been real sex strikes, known as ‘Lysistratic nonaction’ – including in Colombia, Italy, and Togo. In 2019, #MeToo activists called for a sex strike in response to anti-abortion legislation in the US.

• Take a look at this sketch (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWuc18xISwI) from the longstanding American sketch show Saturday Night Live – consider the ways it employs several of Aristophanes’ techniques in its approach to generating laughs, including gender play, political satire, humour that is crude and silly, physical comedy, and absurd extrapolations on real people and events (the scene satirises the hostility between the right wing Trump administration and the American press in 2017).
• Watch Spike Lee’s film Chi-Raq and consider the ways it draws on – but also alters – Aristophanes’ characters and plot. In what ways does the film seek to raise both laughs and awareness – does it achieve one more than the other? Does it achieve them through the same devices or through different devices for different aims?
• For a run down of real life sex strikes, see the entry on Lysistratic nonaction at the Global Nonviolent Action Database (link: https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/category/gene-sharps-198/057-lysistratic-nonaction). This might give you potential directions for research for a new production – how might such a production engage with real life examples of sex strikes?

You can watch a recent production by British theatre company the Actors of Dionysus here (link: https://vimeo.com/402257276)

Take a look (Link: https://www.cambridgegreekplay.com/plays/2016/antigonelysistrata) at the resources available around the 2016 Cambridge Greek Play, which was a double bill of Lysistrata with the story of a resistant woman from Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Antigone. The production was in ancient Greek: watching clips (with subtitles!) will help give you a sense of what the untranslated text sounds like.