Aristophanes' Frogs and Peace will be performed by the children of Hackney at 2.30pm on 7th July, 2008.

Each play will last approximately 45 minutes and there will be a 15 minute interval between the two plays. The whole performance will be finished by 4.30pm.

The performance is being held at the Bloomsbury Theatre, which can be found at:

UCL Bloomsbury Theatre
5 Gordon Street
London
WC1H 0AH
020 7388 8822

You can get directions online at their website at www.thebloomsbury.com

PEACE
By Aristophanes
Written 421 B.C.

Summary...

In 421 B.C., the Athenians were already ten years into a great war with Sparta. This play was staged seven months after Cleon and Brasidas, the main champions of the war on either side, had been killed in battle and a few weeks before the ratification of the 'Peace of Nicias', which suspended hostilities between Athens and Sparta for six years.

The driving force of the play is the intense desire of citizens for relief from the miseries of war. Trygaeus, a farmer, finding no help in men, resolves to climb to heaven to ask Zeus for an end to war. With this object he has fed and trained a gigantic dung-beetle, which he mounts, and rides up to heaven. He reaches Olympus to discover that the gods have gone elsewhere, and that heaven is occupied by War, who is busy pounding up the Greek States in a huge mortar. However, all is not lost, for learning from Hermes that the goddess Peace has been cast into a pit, where she is kept prisoner, he calls upon the different peoples of Greece to work together and rescue her, and with their help he drags her out and brings her back in triumph to earth.

FROGS
by Aristophanes
Written 405 B.C.

Summary...

The Frogs was written a year after the death of the ancient tragic playwrights Euripides and Sophocles in 406 B.C. It is a comic story of how the god of theatre, mischief and festivities, Dionysus, attempts to save poetry by travelling to the underworld to bring back the best poet. He sets off with his slave Xanthias, and after many comic mishaps, finally reach the land of the dead, where he has to find the best poet and bring him back to earth.

This play, while it can be seen as a light-hearted literary escapism, in fact can also be seen to express the deep uncertainty of the times, and the quest for some sort of voice of reason and wisdom that Aristophanes felt politicians and others were not providing, and perhaps a fear that poetry, once prized and looked to for guidance, was losing its way.

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