Sophocles’ Theban
plays are among the all-time greatest stories in literature, and along with
Aeschylus and Euripides, was one of the great dramatists of the Athenian Golden
Age. Mythic, epic and created on a grand scale, Sophocles’ plays changed
theatrical form as it was then known and became classics of their time and for
all time. Presented here by independent company Furies at Darlinghurst’s Tap
Gallery’s intimate downstairs theatre, Antigone
is, alongside Oedipus the King (or Oedipus Rex as it is more commonly
known), perhaps his most well known play. The story of Antigone, Oedipus’
daughter, it tells the struggle of how she strove to give her brother
Polyneices the burial he deserved. Defying the order of the king, she faces the
consequences of her actions, setting in motion a tragic (albeit preventable) train
of events.
Very much a tragedy
in the Greek sense and in a modern sense, Seamus Heaney’s version of Sophocles’
play is clean, clear and fresh. Unlike Ted Hughes’ translation of Racine’s Phèdre
as produced by Bell Shakespeare last year, there are no brutal slabs of text or
rhyming couplets, no jagged edges, just crisp performable lines, equally suited
to the Greek tragedy style as well as a contemporary mode of performance. And
here, as envisaged by Furies, there are shades of modern wars and conflicts,
civilian deaths; news footage of grieving wives and mothers and daughters,
fathers, sons, brothers; about cultural fear and fear-mongering, about panic; about
traditions and right actions, courage and defiance… Eamon Flack in his writer’s
note in the Currency
Classics edition of Antigone
expands upon these parallels, showing how the story is as much about then as it
is about now, and it’s hard not to feel moved by Antigone’s impassioned plea
for her brother’s burial, even if she knows it is outside the law.
The cast here are
all strong, and the direction by Chris McKay is assured, clear and focused.
Nothing gets lost in the telling or performing of this tragedy, and even though
there is always the heightened nature of Greek tragedy, it never crosses over
into histrionic or hysterical, but rather stays grounded in a more naturalistic
interpretation of the story, and it is all the more stronger for it. The set,
designed by Lucy Watson, is fragmented and broken, a nightmarish blend of black
floor, white walls, yellow cracklines, and a garish Munch-esque painting of the
gods. This description makes it sound gaudy and ungainly, but it isn’t, not
really – set, though not explicitly, in a dystopian future we are told in the program
notes, it is clearly a world in which something is not right, and the gods are
angry. The guards and messengers – James Stubbs Grigoriou and Joshua O’Sullivan
– speak in truisms and jargon; Peter Jamesion’s Chorus is a cross between a
news reporter, political sycophant and a humble narrator, nicely stepping
between the three as the scenes change. Michael Booker’s Haemon is downplayed
and real, Creon’s anguished son trying to get his father to see reason, while
in Brendan Layton’s Creon, there are shades of every political leader, every
public figure who doesn’t listen to his people and dangerously, blindly,
follows tradition, and there is a real power and danger to his king too. Peter Bertoni
as the blind prophet Tiresias is perhaps the most exaggerated, but in his gruff
voice, beard and robes, he looks and sounds every bit the crazed godly messenger,
and makes sense of what could be a hellfire-and-brimstone kind of all-seeing,
all-knowing character. Emma White’s Eurydice, while only really seen at the
end, conveys the pathos and stoicism in the queen, and her death compounds the
grief and tragedy of the play. As Ismene, Krystiann Dingas brought a sisterly
affection and tenderness to her role, while Emilia Stubbs Grigoriou brought a
fierce determination and immovable resolution to her Antigone, helping to
ground the production in a real world of emotion, grief and tragedy.
There is much to
admire in this production – from the passion and conviction of the cast, to the
simplicity and rawness of their playing and the set and costumes, to the clearness
and focus of the direction. For the first time, I felt the power in these
tragedies and realised just how pertinent they are to our contemporary culture –
beneath their epic emotions and their borderline histrionic conniptions, are beating
thumping hearts which have not stopped in two and a half thousand years.
Perhaps it's time we looked at them again.
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