Lysistrata
By Aristophanes

Lysistrata is not merely a comedy about war and love. It insists on being a profoundly political, deeply human-centred work, focused on that moment when a society, exhausted by blight, urgently seeks a new mode of organising itself.

The National Theatre of Northern Greece presents a contemporary stage reading of Aristophanes’ comedy, which, by virtue of laughter, addresses us with an authentically lyrical yet comedic earnestness, speaking to the entropy into which societies so often lapse.

As a term springing from physics and philosophy, entropy denotes the gradual unwinding of order, the dispersal of energy, and the inability of a system to achieve self-regulation.

In Lysistrata, the city-state exists in a condition of prolonged decay, in which war has turned into an end in itself, politics has severed its ties with lived human experience, and the body has been expelled from public discourse.

The archetypal figure/heroine does not propose reform, nor does she introduce any new institutional rearrangements. On the contrary, Lysistrata brings forward something entirely different: the reinstatement of the body, of desire, of care, and of collective responsibility as political action. Abstinence from the act of love does not translate to punishment, but to a gesture of “entropy suspension”, a temporary “freezing” of the system so that its restart remains feasible.

At the core of this directorial approach by Asterios Peltekis lies precisely this gesture, one accomplished not through violence or coercion, but through the conscious refusal to participate in this vicious cycle. Women do not merely take over the Acropolis; they take over time, the flow of events, the very same rationale behind the inextricable calamity. Here, comedy does not serve as a decompression valve but as a generator of revelation.

Aristophanes reminds us that any society that loses touch with the body and with joy is inevitably driven to violence. Moreover, that reconstitution does not begin from the higher echelons of power, but from a grassroots instinct for survival – from that instance when a human being dares to say, “enough.”

At the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, where for centuries we gather as a community to confront our limits, our very own Lysistrata aspires to resurface not as a monument of ancient dramaturgy, nor as a reflection of an ancient-bound expression, but as a breathing political event. A reminder that even amid the direst decay, renewal remains possible if only we dare to imagine our existence and, mostly, coexistence under a new light. As if in a dream.