Review: Antigone after Sophocles

Sophocles for the Twitter generation

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Antigone After Sophocles transports Sophocles’ tragedy out of Ancient Greece and into the 2011 London riots.

We follow Antigone, or ‘Anne’, desperately attempting to bury her disgraced brother Polynices against the wishes of Anne’s uncle, police chief Creon: Pol died rioting against the system and, by implication, his own flesh and blood.

The play’s contemporary setting is consistently reinforced. Anne frequently vents her frustration against ‘the system’ and its values by exclaiming ‘I don’t give a bitch’.

References to Twitter are juxtaposed with BBC news and mobile phone footage of the riots, effectively establishing the sense of anarchy and subversion that Anne partly fuels.

Director Marchella Ward is to be praised for her unorthodox approach to staging the play. Given only the outline of a script Ward has taken the gamble of improvising a number of scenes and it has, for the most part, paid off.

Anne and Ismene’s police interview is particularly cleverly handled, with the two sisters at opposite ends of the stage frequently contradicting and cutting into one another’s statements.

One classical hallmark that has survived is the chorus. The play’s surprise stars morph from rioters into journalists into, and bizarrely, bathroom furniture. In the opening scenes they effectively give voice to the complexity and contradictions surrounding Anne’s divided loyalties.

However, the play is flawed: what should render Antigone tragic is the all-powerful state’s neglect of human emotion. Yet at no point is it made clear whether we are to regard the 2011 Metropolitan police force as that unfeeling ‘state’ that was criticized in Sophocles original.

This has implications for the final scene. Creon has lost everything and yet Tom Hilton’s Police Chief fails to achieve the depths of tragic despair at the realization that the trust he foolishly placed in his own power has cost him everything. Ultimately the effect is not tragic, nor even cathartic, but just confusing.

Whilst Antigone is cleverly staged and well acted, the concept behind this new adaptation fails to tackle – and in some cases even dodges – those big questions Sophocles posed back in 441 BC.