A pretty funny look into the war of the sexes, in what may possibly be the first feminist plea for a world without war.

Not my type of book, a Greek comedic play, but my friend wanted me to read it, and so I did.

Funny like in Aristophanes. A vulgar comedy play from the founder of the genre.

An Athenian woman, Lysistrata, plots a vicious plan to end the war. No one dips his finger in the honey until the war is ceased. A piece of ass for a peace of men. The girls' conspiracy is well contrived. Could it work nowadays as well?

Women love Peace but also the Spartan six-packs. Well... it seems that peace is on our own initiative.
We bring you to life guys and we send you to hell too. You need to realise who rules this planet from the beginning of time and the driving force behind everything.
Honey, the phanny fans funny in Aristophanes.

Bawdy or not, every woman that respects herself and considers her vagina can move mountains should read this play.

Lysistrata

No Peacey,
No Pussy!!

- or -

Make Love or Make War,
You can't have both!

The women of Greece, tired of war and its devastation, bring their message home to the men, et voilà, the Peace Movement is launched...

A fun play about trying to stop war with refusing to have sex with the husband's, fela timely and could have easily been published now.

An amusing and short play published here as a Penguin 60s Classic, in which the women of Athens determine that the constant war, which interrups their time with their husbands and sons, must be stopped.
Their method of choice to encourage their menfolk to make peace is to withhold sex until they agree. There are some funny lines, some good excuses the women try to leave the Acropolis to return to their houses.

A quick easy read - 3 stars.

This play was hilarious, and to think I probably never would have read it if not for drama. Another point to school.

This ended up being a piss poor edition for me to experience the written form of this play through. The play itself was tolerable, and given what I know about modern translations of ancient pieces such as Beowulf and the Odyssey, I have more tolerance for the slangy/casual style that is more likely to capture at least the pathos, if not the logos. However, the ending pieces that were supposed to provide context were little more than the translator's personal soap boxes, and after getting through her special breed of myopic Eurocentric conservatism, the positives of the previous, less than arduous translation started to pale in the face of all the ahistorical biases I could easily assume the text was riddled with. As such, I will be rereading this piece at some point as of yet unknown, ideally in an edition that is fully capable of tackling the original works riotous bawdiness and scathing satire without stuffing in completely uncalled for political preferences and points of ignorance (Africa treated as a monolithic country, anyone?). All in all, I did appreciate when the translator finally got down to business and got into the nitty gritty of women in Ancient Greece, and that, plus the worth of the original play, gave it that extra star. However, a slang tone with the translation does not excuse sloppiness with the holistic academia, and I expect translators to be up to stuff even in the midst of (supposedly) giving the reader a good time.

This was hilarious. Women withholding sex until all the men stopped the war. What an imaginative idea. I especially liked how the women fought against their own desires despite being in heat. Several laugh out loud moments for me.

Lysistrata by Aristophanes is 932nd on The Greatest Books of All Time site

Second time unlucky

BBC productions are almost always a sublime pleasure.
And yet this time I failed to reach pleasurable heights.

There may be a nocebo effect involved.

I have listened to another version of this play, recorded for the Romanian National Radio.
Since the first it was not lucky, I hoped it might get better, with an eventual better rendition from the masters of the British theater...

It didn't work.

As mentioned, it might be the nocebo, the mindset that the play is not what I like.

Then, the BBC play suffers from a wrong perspective.

If you ask me.

The accents of the actors are supposed to be exotic, supposedly to make listeners think of Greeks...

Ancient if possible.

But to me they sounded like Indians and artificial to boot.

The main fault of the play is the subject.

Women decide to deprive their men of sex.
The purpose sounds noble, if you look at it in the proper way.
But I took the wrong angle and saw the idea as sort of silly.

The women want to stop wars and attack men in a vulnerable, sensitive area.

Alas, they also want intercourse.

So a number of the women break the blockade.

Then there is talk of dildos, erections, which, under different circumstances might have added spice, excitement to the show.

But, as it is, in my case it just sounded wrong and vulgar.

Listening to the end and the credits, I realize that I might have been on to something.

In the cast there are some names with an Indian resonance.

Ergo, I wasn't so out of line when saying the accents did not sound Greek to me.

There is Music added to this 2005 version.

It didn't help, it actually blended in rather badly.

It is probably my inability to connect with this ancient work, but there it is...

I just don't seem to like the idea of women just saying no to sex...for an indefinite period of time.

Lysistrata est l'une des plus célèbres pièces d'Aristophane. A l'époque où il l'écrivit, la cité Athénienne est dans une situation critique, le désastre de l'invasion de la Sicile ayant précipité la défection de nombres d'alliés, et enhardi les Spartiates à s'approcher toujours plus de l'Attique. Toujours partisan de la paix et fustigeant les va-t-en guerre, Aristophane imagine un scénario rocambolesque digne de l'ambiance Dionysiaque des fêtes pendant lesquelles la pièce était jouée: Lysistrata (en grec, celle qui délie l'armée) fomente une cabale avec les femmes de Grèce: se retrancher dans l'Acropole, et faire la grève du sexe jusqu'à ce que les hommes acceptent enfin de déposer les armes. Outre les extravagances obscènes et comiques qu'ouvrent un tel scénario, Aristophane en profite pour glisser quelques messages politiques, appelant les hommes de bonne volonté à mettre leurs différents de côté, et à s'unir contre les méchants qui les séduisent au service de leurs ambitions. Une pièce très amusante, servie par la grande inventivité d'Aristophane pour forger de nouveaux mots. Cette édition est bilingue, fournie avec un bon appareil critique, une introduction et un lexique.

Illustrations de Aubrey Beardsley:
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