Lysistrata, Megaron, Athens

A Greek satire with knobs on

Last year, Greece launched its four-year Cultural Olympiad with a new Prometheus directed by Robert Wilson that should have had a new score by Iannis Xenakis. Sadly, the composer was already too ill to write and died a week after the opening. This year, the Olympiad has been luckier with a new Lysistrata by the 77-year-old Mikis Theodorakis, Xenakis's fellow partisan in the wartime resistance.

Here, Theodorakis is known at best only as the composer of Zorba the Greek: not one of his four previous operas gets a mention in any current UK opera guide. At home, he enjoys almost legendary status as a hero of the old Greek left whose tireless campaigning for social and political justice has seen him repeatedly imprisoned and tortured – and his music banned – by successive right-wing regimes, yet who has managed nevertheless to compose a catalogue of operas, symphonies, oratorios, film and theatre scores, as well as literally thousands of songs, that almost singlehandedly define Greece's modern musical identity.

Adapted from Aristophanes's pacifist farce, Lysistrata is the proto-feminist fantasy in which the women of Greece, frustrated by the endless fighting between Athens and Sparta, stiffen their men's resolve to make peace by denying them sex. Cue plenty of "stand-up" comedy, ancient Greek style, as what Plato almost called "the desire and pursuit of the hole" inexorably drives the men to accept that "make love, not war" isn't just a slogan but a biological imperative.

Satire with knobs on, it's a perfect piece for this veteran political activist, and, unlike the slow, hieratically statuesque style of his three tragedies, Lysistrata comes across as a glorious, fun-filled romp, written in an eclectic "symphonic" style that combines lush Puccinian lyricism and soaring Straussian lines (for the female leads) with popular Greek dances, swelling choral anthems (very much in Prokofiev's patriotic mode) and just a hint of bouzouki, all set in motion by a martial snare-drum beat whose ostinato tattoo is a surely deliberate echo of Ravel's Bolero, that epitome of agonisingly prolonged tension and shudderingly climactic release.

There are gems along the way, such as the women's limpid pizzicato-led paean to "the light of peace" and the series of scene-setting pop ballads for the interpolated figure of the Poet – part Aristophanes, part Theodorakis – delivered with charismatic eloquence by Greek pop idol George Dalaras. There are nice touches of self-parody too, as when one character mistakenly launches into a number from Theodorakis's great Neruda cantata Canto General only to be stopped by the conductor, or when the Poet plagiarises a melody by Manos Hadjidakis, the composer of Never on Sunday, prompting the ghost of Theodorakis's old rival to come on stage brandishing a spear. The placards, though, in the demo scene are uncomically topical: "Peace in the Middle East," they read, "Down with Globalisation", "No Genoa Here".

Musically this premiere production does Theodorakis proud: there may not be much scope for individual characterisation in what is basically an inflated sketch, but both casts rise to the often taxing vocal demands. And if, within the trendy, graffiti-covered, phallic-symbol-strewn white-box set, the production itself is pretty conventional and the direction sometimes amateurish, the plot largely steers itself, especially after the interval, when it's a case of "all hands on dick" as large red dildos sprout from each male groin.

The concluding hymn to brotherly love and pan-Hellenic unity may not be quite the climax all those distended members were straining for, but there's no doubting the sincerity of his music.

Theodorakis has hinted this will be his final work. It may be no Falstaff, but it boasts more good tunes than most West End musicals, and a worthier message. Not quite better than sex, then, but not a bad way to say goodbye.

Touring to Epidauros, Ioannina, Thessaloniki and Istanbul. Details at www.cultural-olympiad.gr