Lysistrata on the Arabic Stage

Aristophanes' Lysistrata is one of the world's foremost anti-war plays. Written and produced during the Peloponnesian civil war between Athens and Sparta the play expresses strong criticism of the war. Its basic premise is that all the women of Greece, under the leadership of Lysistrata, go on a sex strike so as to pressure the men to stop fighting. They also occupy the Acropolis, the symbol of Athenian democracy, transgressing on a traditionally male space to prevent men from getting money for the war. In Aristophanes' comic utopia, sex and politics are inextricably bound: peace is identified with sex and war with the absence of it. The universal sex strike is successful, as men find it impossible to do without sex and the comedy has a happy, though ironic ending.

Whatever the meaning of the play in antiquity, Lysistrata has strongly fascinated modern audiences and has been by far the most frequently performed Aristophanic comedy of the twentieth century in the West.¹ Once again Lysistrata's significance as a classic has been highlighted as an open-ended work that can be shaped to respond to cultural concerns across time and geography. As part of the Lysistrata Project over 1000 readings of Lysistrata were held worldwide on March 3, 2003, to protest the war of the U.S. against Iraq that was then imminent.² This innovative project was initiated and organized by two New York-based actors, Kathryn Blume and Sharron Bower who, using the resources of the Internet were able to mobilize over 300,000 people and to set up readings in 59 countries in just over six weeks. The remarkable grassroots effort sustains a strong twentieth-century tradition of regarding Lysistrata as an activist play, and attempts to reformulate its politics on a global scale.³

While the majority of participations in the Lysistrata Project were from the West, a few readings were held in Arabic countries, particularly of the Mediterranean region. As a Greek, coming from a country that has been in close contact with Mediterranean Arabs, these readings stimulated my curiosity: what does it mean to stage Lysistrata today for Arabic audiences? In an attempt to answer this question I invited Arab theatre practitioners, playwrights and theorists from the Mediterranean to write, hypothetically, about how they would stage Lysistrata in their own cultures. I began the project in the spring of 2004 and presented it in an earlier form at the intercultural conference, The Comic Condition as a Play with Incongruities, held at the University of Tetouan, in Tetouan, Morocco, April 27–May 1, 2005.

Even though Aristophanes is not unknown to the Arabic theatre of the Mediterranean, there is no tradition of staging Attic comedy, as in the West, that could illuminate contemporary aesthetics and politics. Since my interest is in the present, I have decided to leave historical exploration out of the project and to formulate my inquiry as a dramaturgical project. The project aims at exploring the social import of the contemporary Arabic theatre, using Lysistrata as a focal point. The play ideally lends itself to highlighting Arabic perspectives on important issues such as war, gender and sexual politics and transgressive behavior. I have attempted to create a forum, allowing Arab artists and intellectuals to speak in their own words about these issues. The majority of the contributions I received come from Egypt, which is understandable, considering that this country is a major cultural center in the Arab world today.⁴ In spite of my efforts to get women to participate in the project most of the respondents have been men, well-established theatre professionals in their own countries. A highlight of the project is that it inspired the reputed Egyptian playwright Lenin El Ramly to write a full-length play based on Lysistrata, entitled Peace of Women, which was produced in Cairo in December 2004 and led to heated discussion in the Egyptian press about Lysistrata, the...