The Athenian elite have gathered for another drunken debate round Agathon's place, hungover from the night before but all too willing to spout forth on love, beauty and whose speech is the best. Plato's Symposium is an unlikely piece of theatre, and just the kind of thing you'd expect to see in Oxford. Classics scholars aside, however, this play is unlikely to keep the unenlightened very interested.

The structure of the play is all-important and very simple. The characters takes it in turns to talk about what love is. Each develops the idea to a more sophisticated degree, from love as divine (sadly the characters don't actually say "Its just brilliant, innit?"), through love embodied in mind and body, until Socrates arrives at love as that which bridges mind and body. Nearing the peak of the argument he remembers an old conversation with Diotema in which she described how awareness of that bridging function allows humans to take this understanding and learn how to live - how to find beauty and love in their lives. The perfect message for Valentine's?

In the second half of the play we find the characters (unconsciously) putting this understanding into practice with varying degrees of success. The drunken Alcibiades reveals how he tried to seduce Socrates but was rejected. In terms of Plato's argument, Alcibades thought that through physically touching Socrates he could unite mind and body, but Socrates' cold shoulder showed the naivety of his intentions. As the guests become sleepy Dr Eryximachus takes sweet young Phaedrus home, but Pausanias gets in a strop with his lover Agathon and storms out. Agathon and the poet Aristophanes talk in into the night with Socrates before they fall asleep, leaving Socrates to go into the fresh morning and return to philosophy, purity, and immortality.

Does it work as a piece of theatre? It is played tongue-in-cheek and some comic moments work well - as Alcibiades staggers in late and accidentally sits on the big philosopher, his "Bloody hell Socrates, how long have you been hiding there?!" is Pythonesque. But the static nature of the dialogue, with the actors sitting in the same positions throughout, makes it easy for the audience to switch off and miss a stage in the evolving argument. Reading the actual text would give the reader a greater understanding of what Plato is doing.

Since the characters are historical figures whose personalities are, as such, given, they cannot develop or flourish; rather, each has his or her own fixed traits that are repeated whenever the light is upon them. Nor, since the characters have little chance to interact, this being a series of monologues, can the personalities become interesting by playing off one another. One cannot fault the actors. Socrates comes across as insufferably smug, but how can he not, since his whole life was spent knocking people's arguments down without stating a position himself?

As a piece of entertainment the whole thing would have been more watchable if they had just got drunk and played truth or dare. As a piece of philosophy, read the book.

Ben O'Loughlin 11th February 2003