LYSISTRATA by Aristophanes

The National Theatre of Northern Greece presents Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, directed by Asterios Peltekis and featuring an outstanding cast and creative team, with Elisavet Konstantinidou in the title role. This contemporary stage interpretation employs humour as its vehicle to articulate a discourse of genuine “comic” seriousness on the entropy of a society.

Lysistrata is not merely a comedy about war and love, but a profoundly political, deeply human-centred play that focuses on the moment when a society, exhausted by decay, begins to seek a new way of being. The city-state is in a state of prolonged disintegration: war has become an end in itself, politics has been severed from human experience, and the body has been banished from public discourse. Entropy serves as a central metaphor for a system’s inability to halt its own decline.

The archetypal heroine does not propose reforms or new institutions. She introduces something radically different: the reemergence of the body, desire, and collective responsibility as a political act. Abstaining from love does not function as a punishment, but as an act of suspension- a temporary “freeze” that makes it possible to restart the world.

At the core of the directorial approach lies this very gesture: not imposition, but the conscious refusal to participate in a vicious cycle. The women do not merely occupy the Acropolis; they occupy time itself, the flow of events. Comedy becomes a mechanism of revelation, exposing the cracks in a world teetering between collapse and the need for reinvention.

• WITH ENGLISH AND GREEK SURTITLES
• SUITABLE FOR AGES 12+
• DURATION: 120 MINUTES