Good dirty fun
Translating Aristophanes’ comedies can be a right bugger. As early as the first century AD, the highly educated culture-hound Plutarch warned against reciting Aristophanes at a dinner party – an early version of doing the Monty Python dead parrot sketch for your friends – because each guest would need a personal tutor to explain the political references and obscure vocabulary.
.. One dismayed modern critic proposed that Aristophanes must have had a stroke that had affected his sense of inhibition, because his late plays were so filled with genitalia, excreta, and multiform things to do with both.
.. The director Peter Hall, when he put on Lysistrata in the 1990s, explained that he decided to put his cast in masks not because ancient theatre always used masks, but because the play was so rude he couldn’t imagine doing it face to face with a modern London audience.