TITLE: LYSISTRATA
AUTHOR: ARISTOPHANES
WHERE: LONDON'S WEST END
THE BOTTOM LINE: A Greek antiwar classic gets a faithfully bawdy rendition and some pointed contemporary context.
AFTER FOUNDING THE ROYAL Shakespeare Company, then succeeding Laurence Olivier as head of the Royal National Theatre, director Peter Hall gave his life a really tricky third act: he vowed to turn a profit staging the classics for the mainstream commercial theater. Not musicals, not sex farces, not topical contemporary screeds, but esteemed texts by dead, white, male and mostly European playwrights, generally rendered in the original period and ethnicity rather than revamped for political correctness.
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