"Spymonkey's The Frogs". Kiln Theatre
405 BC was a great year for Greek theatre*. It saw the premieres of two of the most important plays Western culture has ever produced: Euripides’ The Bacchae and Aristophanes’ The Frogs : the first one of the bloodiest and most anarchic tragedies ever written; the second one of the oldest, and yet still one of the most modern, comedies of all time. Both of them won first prize at their respective festivals. And astonishingly, both of them star the same character, Dionysus. In The Bacchae , he is a murderous, hedonistic force of nature. And in The Frogs , well, he’s a buffoon. Coming out of the auditorium at the Kiln Theatre on Kilburn High Road, it was perhaps not a surprise to bump into Oxford Emeritus Professor of Classics, Oliver Taplin. Professor Taplin consumes Greek theatre wherever it can be found, and knows more about it than probably anyone in the country (almost definitely more than anyone in Kilburn). He and I agreed that the theatre company Spymonkey’s banner statement for...