Playwright Ellana Costa writes in the program notes of her play Before Lysistrata, “Aristophanes' Lysistrata is, on the surface, a funny biting play about sex and war.” If only were it true of Before Lysistrata.As biting as a de-dentured dementia sufferer who has forgotten how to chew, as sexy as a diagnosis for Hep C, and about as funny, Before Lysistrata plays like a Year 9 drama exercise, earnest in its self importance and lacking any disciplinary stage craft. Set during the war between Athens and Sparta, it pits the two First Ladies of those states against each other in a hearts and minds exercise in support of their shirt-fronting spouses.
In prose and poetry as dry as the prairie and performances bordering on the Arctic, Before Lysistrata uses distracting digital technology instead of dramatic personae to deliver it's knackered narrative. Quotes from Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War are projected on the wall to embroider the hyperbole with irritating pedantry and pretentiousness, suffocating any semblance of performance from the hapless actors. The screening of these epigrams work as an epitaph for dramatic drive, reducing it to didactic drivel.
Music that resembles the cheesy soundtrack of Seventies porn flicks, interspersed with Dusty Springfield's Wishing and Hoping, compete with the limp lines that are barely projected from the throats of the thesps, a true Thalian failure.
Such juvenile jejuneness cannot be incubated by lenience when questions, contrasts and comparisons of martyrdom, heroism, belief in reason, belief in God and faith in fighting are posited and not acted upon.
A film spliced with ex world leaders, predominantly Presidents of the United States, projected ad nauseum, is, in this production, the pinnacle of post graduate gratuitousness and the pit of naive political polemic.
Invoking Lysistrata conjures conjugal conflict but there is nothing lusty (save for it being part of the director's name) about this rather lack lustre production.
Before Lysistrata is a theatrical lacuna – pun intended.
Montague Basement present
Before Lysistrata
by Ellana Costa | story by Ellana Costa and Michaela Savina
Directed by Saro Lusty-Cavallari
Venue: Kings Cross Theatre | Level 2, 244-248 William Street, Kings Cross NSW
Dates: 11 – 22 July 2017
Bookings: www.montaguebasement.com
