Antigone

Sophocles and his fellow Athenians thought it mandatory for every citizen to join the debates of their new democracy – and that included going to the theatre.

It was surely the start of a good tradition.  So, we should all vote, and also go see Sport for Jove’s urgent new version of Sophocles’ Antigone.

Antigone and her siblings were born of her brother Oedipus bedding his mother.  Oedipus of course ended blind and wandering, and Thebes shattered by civil strife between Antigone’s two warring brothers. 

When she defies a decree from new ruler Uncle Creon, that one rebel brother must not be buried, the battle is on between the shaky power of a desperate new state and the power of our individual conscience.  And duty to the dead.

As says William Zappa’s commanding, reasonable Creon, do we bury terrorists who cut off the hands of our women so they can’t vote?

Melanie Liertz’ astonishing set of a ravaged city, thick with dust, takes us direct to the terrorist craters of contemporary Aleppo or Mosul.   Damien Ryan’s cast of sometimes Greek-speaking leads (Andrea Demetriades plays the feisty Antigone) and African faces amongst his mostly female chorus of survivors underlines the play’s ancient yet international reach.   

The swaying physicality of this chorus (movingly led by Fiona Press) and the powerful tolling of sound from Bryce Halliday both orchestrate the reasoning and unfolding of this tragedy.

Antigone may be family but, in his new guise of democrat, Creon must uphold his penalty of death, despite the pleas of her lover, his own son Hamon (beautifully pitched by Joseph Del Re).  

Ryan’s confident theatricality, as writer and as co-director with Terry Karabelas, is obvious in how the audience is included and, particularly, the naughty wit and droll modernity of Creon’s sentry (a star spear-carrier turn from Janine Watson).

By the dreadful end, the impact and intellectual rigour of this adaption is eroded by some absurdities and the flat obscurities of the blind seer, Tiresias (Anna Volska). 

But to the final image, Antigone is compelling theatre, and a civic must for all lovers of humanity.

Martin Portus