„The Clouds” by Aristophanes – Thiasos Theatre, UK
„The Clouds” by Aristophanes – Thiasos Theatre, UK
24.05.2025 (Saturday)/8.30 pm/ Stage in The Shed
Creative Team:
Producer & co-director: Yana Zarifi-Sistovari
Director: MJ Coldiron
Composer: Manuel Jimenez
Choreography/Movement: Birte Widmann
Costume Design: Christina Papageorgiou
Principal Costumes: Sao Mourato
Cloud costume construction: Evangelia Tsiouni
Cloud headdress design and construction: Dimitra Kaisari
Cast (in order of appearance):
Strepsiades: James Jack Bentham
Student: Salvatore Scarpa
Socrates: Charles Sobry
Cloud Chorus: Alexandra Andrei, Birte Widmann, Jack Rumsey, Elliot Windsor
Hipparchia: (special guest star) Joanna Holcgreber
Students of the Thinkery: Julia Zhaglina and Anna Szymczak
Philosophers and clouds in Aristophanes’ Clouds
Aristophanes’ Clouds, from which we have extracted our performance, is a partially revised version of the original performed in 423 BCE .
Aristophanes was the best known of a new generation of the‘Old Comedy’ poets. He was strikingly and uniquely skilful at building theatre around ideas—at taking a premise and twisting its logic to turn it into a drama with conflict and characters.
Hence our ‘hero’s’ name, Strepsiades, who ‘tosses and turns’ at night, tormented by his debts, is derived from ‘strephei’ meaning ‘twist’); Strepsiades also wishes to ‘twist’ impending lawsuits to avoid paying his creditors. Dikē means justice so strepsodikēsai means, literally, ‘to twist justice’.
The Clouds is exceptional amongst Aristophanes plays (as indeed amongst all the Old Comedy plays) in at least three ways:
- It has a plot,
- a remarkably integrated chorus
- an ending which is startlingly alien to the festive spirit of Old Comedy where plays traditionally end in feasting and reconciliation.
The plot tells of Strepsiades, an ignorant peasant driven into debt by his son Pheidippedes’ mania for chariot racing. The old man has learnt of a method whereby ‘argument’, as practised in the courts, can pervert reason and truth and twist justice in favour of the wrongdoer. This method is taught—for profit—at the Thinkery, a school run by Socrates where the barefoot, emaciated, pale, flea-ridden students learn about the latest developments in science, philosophy and rhetoric. The traditional Olympian gods have been cast aside in favour of the ambiguous, nebulous chorus of Clouds, and other phenomena such as Vortex, Aether, Chaos and Tongue.
The character of the chorus thus echoes the play’s focus on the trickery of the Sophists and on the absurdities the natural philosophers.
THE PHILOSOPHERS
The Sophists (such as Protagoras, Gorgias and Prodicus) were known for their relativism, clever argumentation, disregard for tradition and teaching for money. Their methods play a prominent part in the plot that backfires after the hollow victory of clever Wrong Argument over the fusty traditional (and lecherous!) Better Argument leads to the burning down of the Thinkery.
The variety of natural philosophers (dating c. 600 to 400 BCE), known collectively as the Presocratics, share a reputation for seeking natural explanation for the Cosmos, speculating about fundamental substances, and replacing myth and religion with material principles. Specific thinkers such as Thales (known for proposing that water is the fundamental principle of all matter), and Chaerephon (who consulted the Delphic oracle declaring Socrates the wisest man), are mentioned by name. The play however abounds in references to unnamed but specific philosophical speculations. These are mainly presented by Socrates as abstractions, which are then made literal by Strepsiades for comic effect.
Bear in mind that Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BCE) and Socrates (c. 470-399), were living and themselves key players along with the philosophers satirised both explicitly and implicitly.
We cannot be certain of the extent to which the audience grasped the finesses of Aristophanes’ jokes. In the parabasis (a traditional break in the action during which the poet speaks directly to the audience) Aristophanes states overtly that his art is above his critics’ heads.
More controversial is Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates. Socrates’ verbal trickery, relativism and replacing of traditional gods with physical explanations is an amalgam of sophism and Presocratic thinking. The (sophistic) argument taught at the Thinkery (that you can justify anything, including beating not only your father, but also your mother) is the last straw: Strepsiades recants and burns down the Thinkery, symbolically rejecting the ‘new’ thinking and returning to belief in the traditional gods.
THE CHORUS
The dissembling, language-quibbling, and intellectual dishonesty of sophistry, are well represented by the physical characteristics of smoke-like, shape-changing, sky-inhabiting clouds. Their role in the play, however, goes beyond the metaphors based on their appearance and on their weather-related properties.
Unusually for Aristophanes’ choruses, these ‘clouds’ are moral agents who are active in deluding Strepsiades and contriving his punishment.
In Greek myth and literature clouds are often active in divine trickery and punishment: in Euripides’ Helen, for instance, it is not the woman Helen herself who was the notorious casus belli of the Trojan war, but rather, a cloud in the image of Helen, sent by Hera to make it seem that the Trojan War had been fought over an illusion. Similarly, Zeus tricked Ixion, who was lusting after Hera, by sending a cloud in her image. Ixion fell into the trap by trying to seduce the ‘cloud’ and so received his legendary punishment of being bound to a wheel of fire spinning eternally in the sky.
In the Clouds, the chorus are invoked as deities by Socrates for Strepsiades’ initiation into the Thinkery in a scene which mocks various secret cults—(Pythagorian, Orphic and possibly Eleusinian mystery cult). The chorus then drifts into sight as a slow majesty of clouds, which have gathered on the mountains, spreading onto the land to shower their benefits of fertility and celebration. The tempo of the entry song is closer to tragedy and very different to the usual entrances of Aristophanes’ choruses.
Even more telling than the music accompanying their appearance is their role in the play: the lyrical beginning changes gradually as the ‘goddesses’ become alienated from Strepsiades and, after maintaining an even hand in the debate between father and son, they foretell disaster and finally approve of the punishment meted out for the injustice he had set out to contrive. This behaviour is more in keeping with tragic choruses who often see in the heroes’ destruction the triumph of the gods’ will.
The jury is out on the significance of the ending. Is it a punishment for undermining traditional morality? Is it Aristophanes’ response to being undervalued? Is it a mockery of academic thought that is increasingly convoluted and detached from reality?
Yana Sistovari.
fot. Maciej Dziaczko