Women Against War. The Trojan Women, Helen, and Lysistrata at Syracuse

Two tragedies by Euripides (Helen and The Trojan Women) and a comedy by Aristophanes (Lysistrata) were presented at the 55th Festival of Greek Theatre at Syracuse (10 May-6 July 2019) on the theme ‘women and war’. The productions of the three plays were not, however, equally successful from an artistic point of view. Davide Livermore, a director whose main field is opera, was able, with his staging of Helen, to create a spectacle both ground-breaking and courageous, by projecting Euripides’ original work into a visionary and fantastic cosmos where different literary genres (tragedy, comedy, melodrama, opera buffa), different temporal dimensions and sensory perceptions mingle and overlap. The staging of The Trojan Women by the French director Muriel Mayette-Holtz (too great a distance between scenography and original text) and that of Lysistrata by Tullio Solenghi (overstated didacticism) were not as artistically effective.