Women in Parliament/Socrates and His Clouds – review

Attack on a profit-obsessed world … Socrates and His Clouds at the Jermyn Street, London. Photograph: Elliott Franks,

• • Michael Billington
  • The Guardian, Monday 10 June 2013

 

Aside from Lysistrata, the plays of Aristophanes rarely get an outing these days. But these two wildly different updates prove one simple point: the more you try to recapture the originals' bawdy exuberance, the more effectively you get across their political message.
Theatro Technis starts with a great advantage: Women in Parliament is Aristophanes's best and most radical play. Written late in his life, and some 12 years after the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian war, it argues that there is only one way to overcome the city's corruption – give power to its women. Their dynamic leader, Praxagora, does something more than stage a parliamentary coup; she envisages a world of free love in which the old and the ugly will be given first bite of the cherry, and property will be shared.
Under the direction of George Eugeniou, this new version is a piece of rough theatre that combines seriousness with fun, beginning and ending with women banging out a militant message, but also playing up the piece's farce. I suspect there is more irony in Aristophanes's revolutionary ideas than emerges here, but the cast, enthusiastically led by Jackie Skarvellis as the tough-minded Praxagora, put it across with the right earthy zest.
That's exactly the quality I found lacking in William Lyons's Socrates and His Clouds. "Inspired by Aristophanes", it turns Socrates from the buffoonish charlatan of the original into a wise, Platonic teacher. But, although the play is clearly intended as a defence of rational discourse and an attack on a profit-obsessed modern world, it lacks the vital Aristophanic vigour. Although Alexander Andreou endows Socrates with an impressive sanity, all the production proved to me was the importance of not being over-earnest.
• Women in Parliament (020-7387 6617) runs until 15 June. Socrates and His Clouds (020-7287 2875) runs until 22 June.