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Review: Pots, Pans, and Parasols: The Comic Genius of Aristophanes' Birds
Reviewed Work(s): The Birds by Nikos Karathanos and Yiannis Asteris
Review by: Helaine L. Smith
Source: Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics , Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall 2018), pp.
161-172
Published by: Trustees of Boston University; Trustees of Boston University through its
publication Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/arion.26.2.0161

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Pots, Pans, and Parasols:
The Comic Genius of Aristophanes’ Birds

HELAINE L. SMITH

A ristophanes’ Birds is an endless delight, but

if you eliminate its props, jokes, characters, coherent plot,
satire, and essential good will, and replace all of that with a
Chorus dressed in Hawaiian shirts and gym sneakers, re-
peatedly stripping, copulating, and threatening the audience
in angry phalanxes, you have The National Theatre of
Greece’s and director Nikos Karathanos’s recipe for how to
destroy a great text.
As conceived by Aristophanes, Pisthetaerus and Euelpides
enter, carrying crows and followed by two exhausted servants,
weighed down with bulging leather sacks, on top of which are
a huge number of cooking pots, fry pans, ladles, and skewers,
poorly secured and clanging against each other. Pisthetaerus
and Euelpides, fed up, or so they think, with the bustle of city
life in Athens, have set out to recover the pastoral dream, a
place of natural ease and quiet, free of taxes, litigation, and
labor, a place also of uninterrupted feasting and sexually avail-
able boys that parents foist upon them. They think that
another ex-Athenian, Tereus—transformed now into Epops,
the Hoopoe Bird, and living among the Birds—can direct
them to such a spot. The travelers are schlepping everything
they own, leaving nothing behind. The message of the pots—
that nothing is left behind—is the play in a nutshell.

The Birds, a production of The National Theatre of Greece, was

performed in modern Greek, with supertitles, at St. Anne’s Ware-
house in Brooklyn, May 2–16, 2018, directed by Nikos Karathanos
in an adaptation by Mr. Karathanos and Yiannis Asteris. With Mr.
Karathanos as “Pisthetaerus” and Aris Servetalis as “Euelpides.”

arion 26.2 fall 2018

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162 pots, pans, and parasols

Almost immediately, Pisthetaerus’s pastoral dream

becomes imperial ambition. He looks up into the clear aether
and envisions colonizing it with a walled city of Birds which
will interdict and tax all two-way traffic—amorous gods
wishing to swoop down to earth at will for sex with mortals,
and mortals wanting to send sweet savors from their altars
up to the Olympian gods. The walled city and the Birds will,
as he is to promise the Chorus when they arrive, become
exceedingly rich and powerful.
A gorgeously-feathered Chorus of Birds enters, summoned
by Tereus, only to find itself in the company of its worst nat-
ural enemy, man, who catches, cages, or—horrible, horrible,
most horrible—cooks and eats birds. Huge in size, they
advance, “beaks leveled,” against a hapless Pisthetaerus and
Euelpides, but are stalled at the sight of the dreaded cooking
pots. The comic agon is made up of equal parts fear and
aggression on the part of the combatants, and laughter for the
audience. (The Karathanos production consisted of the Cho-
rus of Birds threatening the audience, but more of that later.)
“Cloud-cuckoo-land,” the walled city in the sky, is built.
Traffic is interdicted. Horny, sacrifice-starved Olympians
grow desperate, as do their neighbors, the gods of the bar-
barians, and so Zeus sends a delegation comprised of Posei-
don, Herakles, and Triballos (the local barbarian god), to
negotiate the breaking of the blockade, in exchange for
which Zeus promises rainwater “for your puddles”1 and
stormless halcyon days in winter. (Aristophanes’ genius lies,
in part, in his use of everyday objects and familiar associa-
tions to support fantastic propositions.) Forewarned of the
delegation’s arrival, Euelpides and Pisthetaerus break out the
cooking pots and skewers and begin barbecuing chicken
wings on stage to make the reliably ravenous Herakles des-
perate for an immediate resolution that will allow him to
have barbecue for lunch.
These humble household props, the pots, pans, and skew-
ers, now transmuted into vessels of satire, are as essential to
the comedy of this climactic scene as to the comedy of the

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 Helaine L. Smith 163

agon. They tell us that this new city of the Birds is just like
the one Pisthetaerus and Euelpides sought to leave,2 imperi-
alistic and indifferent to its inhabitants, a few of whom have
just become lunch. Human nature remains constant, Cloud-
cuckoo-land is Athens in the air, and those who would pass
through it, nothing more than a vertical reflection of the
Delian League.
Nikos Karathanos, the director of the National Theatre of
Greece’s production of The Birds that played in New York
last spring, eliminated the pots and skewers, the comic bat-
tle that deployed them, and the closing barbecue that made
them negotiating tools, and thereby demonstrated, albeit
unintentionally, how essential Aristophanes’ props are to the
play’s comic and satiric genius. He did the same to
Prometheus’ parasol.
In the penultimate scene of the play, just before the dele-
gation arrive, the Titan Prometheus appears, wrapped head
to toe in a blanket and crouching under the largest3 umbrella
or parasol he can find. He has come to warn the Birds that a
delegation are on the way and to advise Pisthetaerus to
demand Basileia, a goddess no one has ever heard of, in
exchange for unlimited passage of air traffic through Cloud-
cuckoo-land. Aristophanes’ audience knew the myth of
Prometheus and did not need it retold, and so Aristophanes
does not retell it. Formerly “friend to man” and “giver of
fire,” Prometheus is chained to a mountaintop by Zeus and
endures his liver being ripped out each day. Aristophanes
makes Prometheus “friend to bird” and “inventor of barbe-
cue.” So frightened is Prometheus that Zeus will discover
him that, when recognized by Pisthetaerus, who calls out his
name, the heroic god responds with a frantic “Shush!” and
then delivers his warning in a stage whisper. It’s a short
scene, hilarious in its contrast to the heroic figure we expect,
and requires for its humor another mundane household
object—an umbrella.
Karathanos’s Prometheus, on the other hand, entered sans
parasol and wearing a bright orange jump suit, discoursed at

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164 pots, pans, and parasols

length about the vulture, lifted his shirt to show his tummy
scar, ranted about hatred and ill fortune, sang a bad song,
and left. He brought neither news nor advice. Karathanos
had rendered the scene inexplicable for everyone knowing
the text and for everyone not knowing it.
In the prologue, Pisthetaerus and Euelpides consult their
crows, which caw in reply. Both men appear to understand
the cawing—though of course we don’t—“Turn right,” “Up
that trail,” “Circle left,” “Double back,” and so they travel
around the stage in circles, as their hapless slaves put down
and pick up the baggage with each changed direction, until
the group arrives at a rock face out of which a Sandpiper
with a huge beak appears.
The delegation scene makes use of the same device, a voice
on stage forming nonsense sounds, but to a different comic
end. The speaker of gibberish in the delegation scene is Trib-
allos. The scene is funny, not just for Herakles’ readiness to
trash his mission to satisfy his appetite, not even for Posei-
don’s wonderful prissiness as he constantly readjusts the bar-
barian Triballos’ tangled cloak or for his aristocratic com-
plaints that this is what democracy has yielded! but most of
all for Triballos’ having the deciding vote. Pisthetaerus’
terms are outrageous—barbecued wings in exchange for
Basileia, the “goddess who controls Zeus’ thunderbolts.”
Possessing Basileia means supplanting the power of Zeus.
The delegation put Pisthetaerus’ terms to a vote and Herak-
les, salivating at the thought of barbecue, claims that Tribal-
los’s nonsense syllables constitute a vote of “Yes,” making it
two yesses to Poseidon’s one “No.” The delegation exit, hav-
ing conceded everything, as Triballos continues to trip and
tug at his cloak. The negotiation and the vote are a brilliant
riff on Athenian democracy and on the penchant of politi-
cians to use rhetoric to distort the truth. After a brief choral
interlude and the singing of “Hymen, Hymenaios,” Pis-
thetaerus and Basileia enter as bride and groom, step onto
the mêchanê, and are raised upward, signaling Pisthetaerus’
apotheosis into a god.

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 Helaine L. Smith 165

Karathanos took this wonderful scene and excised Posei-

don, Triballos, the point of the barbecue, and the vote. Per-
haps having heard a rumor that gods were involved in the
play’s ending, he brought on Aphrodite, Artemis, Dionysus,
and Zeus as everyone, possibly including the actors them-
selves, wondered what they were doing there.
Among the many pleasures of Aristophanes’ comedy are
the moments when he “breaks the fourth wall,” a term spe-
cific to the proscenium stage but useful even for ancient
Greek drama. “Breaking the fourth wall” is formalized in
the comic parabasis, but occurs throughout Birds and in
Aristophanes’ comedy generally. Characters move down-
stage to “let the audience in on” what is going on, and do so
early in the plays.4 These jokes are, by their very nature, the-
atre jokes. The slave Xanthias in Frogs, following Dionysus,
complains to the audience about having to accompany his
master to seek Euripides in the Land of the Dead; the slaves
in Peace explain why Trygaeus has them feeding dung pat-
ties to a huge beetle; the slaves Sosias and Xanthias in Wasps
invite the audience to guess the particular malady of Philo-
cleon. When the fourth wall is broken, the actors are, at one
and the same time, characters, actors playing those charac-
ters, and actors playing characters who know they are
actors. The audience both watches and participates in the
play, while reminded of what it, an audience so absorbed in
the magic of the play, has temporarily set aside—that it is an
audience watching what is a play.
Aristophanes also loves to break the fourth wall by refer-
ring to other plays and performances. When, for example,
Pisthetaerus and Euelpides comment on the sparse and
bedraggled state of Tereus’ feathers, Tereus answers, “I can’t
help it. This is how Sophocles dressed me in his lousy tragedy,
Tereus.” When the ragged and ghastly figure of Penuria comes
onstage in Wealth, Chremylus and Blepsidemus guess that she
has escaped from the Eumenides rehearsal down the hall.
And when Pisthetaerus and Euelpides fear that they will be
unable to communicate their plan for “a polis in the polos”

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166 pots, pans, and parasols

to the Birds, Tereus reassures them that he’s taught the Cho-
rus “to speak Greek.” For the moment everything merges
into a glorious, dizzying comic whole.
And there is the parabasis, “the coming [downstage]
beside, or stepping over or out of.” The final lines of the first
parabasis of Birds belong to the Koryphaios, the Chorus
leader, who assures the audience “there’s nothing better“
than wings. His proofs are coarsely, deliciously funny. If
you’re at the theatre and get hungry and bored by the
tragedies, wings let you fly home, grab a bite, and return “to
see us” (that is, “to see the comedy,” which always played
later in the day). If you’re sitting in the audience and, like
Patrocleides “the shitter,” have to go, you can fly out, “blow
a fart” and come right back. Or if you’re an adulterer and
spot the woman’s husband in one of the reserved seats, you
can fly to her house, “have a fuck,” and get back before the
play is over.
The fourth wall is never breached by Aristophanes with
aggression directed toward his audience. Conflict, physical
and/or intellectual, is written into these comedies, but it
exists solely among the characters themselves. In addition,
antagonists are relatively harmless and easily routed—Frogs
(by farting), Wasps (by smokepots), Birds (by pots and
pans)—or specific characters are mocked, or get their come-
uppance—Socrates and the Sophists (Clouds), Cleon, who
doesn’t even appear (Wasps), Euripides (Women at the Thes-
mophoria), Penury (Wealth)—or dead playwrights battle
each other with lines from their scripts weighed in balance
pans (Frogs), and so on.
The relationship of Karathanos’s The Birds to his audience
was the opposite of Aristophanes’ relationship to his. Aristo-
phanes pokes fun at actual persons and exposes foibles we
all share, but is never condescending, never seeks to épater la
bourgeoisie. Directly or by implication, comically or seri-
ously, Aristophanes offers solutions, however fantastical, to
social and political problems—to litigiousness, war-monger-
ing, acquisitiveness, factional division. Characters are urged,

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 Helaine L. Smith 167

as Lysistrata’s wonderful weaving and carding analogy

teaches, to mend the social fabric, in part by acknowledging
their nature and urges—nature and urges that the audience
admits, by its laughter, that it shares—and at the same time
the audience is invited to celebrate and laugh at those urges.
The essence of those solutions is a sense of things rounded
off, of completion, in an exchange with the audience that is
friendly rather than assaultive. When the Wasps threaten to
sting the Judges in the theatre, or the Birds to poop on them
if Wasps and Birds are not awarded First Prize at the Lenaia,
the tone is one of hilarity, not aggression.
In contrast, and like much of contemporary bad art,
Karathanos’s adaptation imagines itself in possession of
admirably radical social impulses which a repressed, mind-
lessly middle-class audience might absorb through verbal and
sensory assault, but never will through anything as subtle as
satire. When Karanthanos breaks the fourth wall it is as if we
are witnessing a scene out of Marat/Sade in which the mad
inmates of Charenton advance threateningly, not only towards
the Marquis de Sade but towards the audience as well, then
roil about in some sort of choreographed group copulation.5
And so we see Karanthanos’s Bird Chorus perform masturba-
tory pole dances on the set’s shaking palm trees, rip their own
and each other’s clothing off, and turn, again and again, in
tight phalanxes, to threaten the audience, all in scriptless, end-
less, deadly scenes lasting six to ten minutes.
This extraordinary misunderstanding of the function of
Aristophanes’ Bird Chorus was matched by how they were
dressed. Advance publicity promised gorgeously-feathered
Birds. There was a moment of complete dislocation when,
instead of feathers, the Chorus entered in Hawaiian shirts
and sneakers, looking like refugees from a bad 1960’s beach
party or a tough workout at the gym. Garish and unappeal-
ing, but more importantly, at variance with the Birds’ func-
tion in the play. Feathered from head to toe, the Birds do not
so much represent animal nature as they do the “other,” that
which is “foreign,” “different,” non-Athenian. In the politi-

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168 pots, pans, and parasols

cal context of 414 BC, that means the empire which the Athe-
nians created out of the Delian League and the local popula-
tions they subjugated. Actors in feathers are lovely to look at
and exotic. Actors in Hawaiian shirts and sneakers are nei-
ther. They are familiar figures, people with bad taste on
vacation, and most decidedly, consumers of culture, not cul-
tural critics.
Other costumes were equally ill-considered, their “mes-
sages”—if such a word can be applied to costumes—both
out-of-sync with the original script and internally inconsis-
tent. For example, Epops (played by Christos Loulis)
appeared all in black, with black laced boots, black skirt,
and a white bra worn on the outside of his/her shirt. If trans-
gender dressing was meant to replicate the man/bird nature
of Tereus, why add a hump back? What does that suggest if
not physical abnormality? It’s inconceivable that the produc-
tion meant to denigrate the idea of transgender, and yet
that’s what it may, to many, have seemed to do. And why
dress Prometheus, who is desperate to fade into the back-
ground, in bright orange?
Then there was the oddness of the set itself. Karathanos
placed his performers on a dark stage in an angled corner of
the lower performance area of St. Anne’s Warehouse. Trees
of all climates—palm, pine, deciduous—took up a good por-
tion of the playing space and were not only dimly lit, but
played upon by garish yellow and green light. The effect was
something like that which marked the grounds of the
Fontainebleau and other luxe hotels on Collins Avenue in
Miami Beach in the ’50s. Presumably Karathanos intended
the darkness to increase the sense of menace, and it did, but
there is no menace in Birds, only delight and glee. That the
trees remained onstage after the action moved to the sky, to
Cloud-cuckoo-land, meant that Karathanos chose to trade
meaning for menace. Of all Aristophanes’ extant comedies,
Birds is most about air and space, light and freedom—even
more so than Clouds. Not only is bright space Pisthetaerus’
inspiration for building a city in the air, but air is what

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 Helaine L. Smith 169

makes for glorious fooling, as when Meton the geometrician

enters with tools to survey the sky into quadrants and paral-
lel segments. Air and space are also, despite all the play’s
irony about schemes and ambition, what express the free-
dom for which we all yearn. Here was no Meton and no sky.
Zeus’s daughter, his messenger and goddess of the rainbow,
Iris, is most associated with air. But in Karathanos’ produc-
tion she is covered in mud by the end of her scene, which is
mercilessly extended. Aristophanes imagines her swooping
down to Cloud-cuckoo-land bearing an imperious warning
from Zeus, delivered in the tone of a smug, indulged daugh-
ter. She immediately becomes the focus of lecherous com-
ment, is threatened by Pisthetaerus with death, replies “that’s
ridiculous” because she’s “a god and can’t die,” and is shooed
off. It’s a funny scene, light and brief, its humor deriving from
the play of wit and, like the Prometheus scene that follows,
from its comically irreverent portrayal of revered gods.
Karathanos, on the other hand, brought on Iris, played by
Galini Hatzipaschali, threw what we were told was a choco-
late pudding in her face, mud-wrestled her to the ground, and
continued what seemed a run-up to full sexual assault for ten
minutes until she was half-naked and covered in mud, trying
to get up and actually slipping or forced down again by Pis-
thetaerus (played by Karathanos). Aristophanes’ comedies
and those of his contemporaries were full of obscenity, but, as
Henderson argues,6 stage obscenity, like ritual obscenity, bore
no connection to the feeling of shame. Naked women, Dial-
lage in Lysistrata, Procne in Birds, perhaps Harvest and
Plenty in Peace, were not actresses whose costumes were
pulled off on stage for all to see, but male performers in fully
female body costume with comically exaggerated breasts and
hips, just as male chorus members, servants, and figures such
as Kinesias wore extended phalloi. No one was shamed, no
fourth wall was broken, and everyone could laugh.
Insofar as anyone thought she saw a hapless female per-
former trying to keep her job in a company whose director

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170 pots, pans, and parasols

ignored both dramatic necessity and elementary standards of

taste, the fourth wall was indeed breached, but in a way that
was not at all funny and not at all Greek.
That there could be such misogyny in a production that
also cast Vasiliki Driva as Procne was a mystery. Procne the
Nightingale, wife to Tereus, summons, with her honey voice,
the Chorus to the parodos and, beautiful and undressed,
arouses all manner of admiring suggestive comment from Pis-
thetaerus and Euelpides. In a remarkable piece of casting, in
which clothing was retained, the part of Procne went to an
actress suffering from dwarfism (achondroplasia) and implic-
itly redefined traditional notions of beauty. That the produc-
tion could move from that to the Iris scene suggested, at best,
an unresolved view of women and, if nothing else, a failure to
understand what drama, and especially great drama, must do.
All great plays have a clear focus. In other words, stage
business and dialogue must work together to the same end.
In Karathanos’s production, once the Sandpiper appeared
from a rock-face, all attention was diverted to his tree acro-
batics. As we watched an extraordinarily agile actor (played
by Michalis Sarantis) ascending and descending a fore-
grounded tree, swinging from it with bent leg as if it were a
trapeze, then righting himself, again and again, the script
and story went out the window. All we could think of was,
“Will he fall?” or, “How amazing that he hasn’t.”
There’s something else that a great play must have—lan-
guage whose register expresses the intellectual and emotional
range of the script. Comedy is often the result of sudden con-
trast, and coarse jokes are funny in part because they create
an unexpected shift of register. But when everything is
coarse, no coarse joke or action is funny. And so it was with
this misbegotten adaptation. Supertitles flashed lines that
were vulgar and at complete variance with the plot: “This
city is never gonna be built.” “You chew on the root and you
grow wings.” “I will kill you because I am the beast and am
rewriting all your laws.” And then there was, “Where the
hell have the ducks gone?”

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 Helaine L. Smith 171

The real question was, Where did Aristophanes go?, its

corollary being, Why did The National Theatre of Greece,
charged with the preservation of perhaps the greatest dra-
matic tradition the world has known, let this happen?

notes

1. My debt here, and for much else, is to Jeffrey Henderson. His inspired
comic translation of telmasin as “puddles” (Aristophanes III, Loeb Classi-
cal Library, Cambridge ma 2000) appears at line 1594.
2. William Arrowsmith, in “Aristophanes’ Birds: The Fantasy Politics of
Eros” (Arion, Spring 1973, 119–67), writes: “Cleruchies or colonies com-
posed mainly of these uprooted peasants and yeomen at Attica were the
obvious social and military consequence of Periclean strategy. At one stroke
Athens succeeded in getting rid of part of her own surplus and discontented
population and employed it to imperial advantage by resettling it in the ter-
ritories of restive subject-cities or strategic military sites . . . They [the
cleruchies] offered the uprooted yeoman the chance to transplant himself to
a less urban though alien environment where he might recreate his old cul-
ture on new ground—a vita nuova, a possible renewal of the old world of
rustic physis [nature] and hēsychia [rest, stillness, quiet]. . .” (122) and
likens these cleruchs to Pisthetaerus and Euelpides.
3. Or under the smallest—either prop is funny onstage.
4. By the time of Wealth (388 bc), direct address to provide the audience
with essential background is replaced by dialogue between characters, as
when, in the prologue, Cario insists his master Chremylos explain to him
why, ever since leaving the shrine, they are tracking a blind man.
5. Though entirely appropriate to Peter Weiss’s play, The Persecution and
Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asy-
lum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, such an
approach is entirely inappropriate to Birds, which is about neither revolu-
tionary madness nor social dissolution.
6. Jeffrey Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic
Comedy, second edition (New York and Oxford 1991).

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