In an introduction to the play, the director, Polly Findlay, invites us to think of Antigone as a “sympathetic female terrorist” right from the start, which is confusing. An opening scene then mimics the moment when Obama and his staff received news of the death of Osama Bin Laden, underlining this view, and Creon talks of “terrorists”, rather than the original “traitors”. A terrorist is someone who uses violence against civilians for political purposes. Antigone only wants to bury her brother in defiance of state decree. Where’s the connection?
Like many plodding modern versions, most notably Brecht’s, this one grossly simplifies the tragic balance of Sophocles’s masterpiece by giving us Antigone as a noble freedom fighter, while Creon is firmly fixed as a dour, bureaucratic tyrant who is clearly in the wrong. The result is virtually no sense of dramatic tension until the very end. The real agony of the original is that both parties are simultaneously right and wrong: there is no easy resolution, and therein lies the tragedy.
The notion of Antigone as some kind of protofeminist heroine is shovelled into the play with an almost comical stridency, thanks in part to Don Taylor’s translation. Certainly, Sophocles’s Creon suffers some panic about the idea of women having any political power, as would any sensible ancient Greek, but here it is larded on so thickly, it only confirms the impression that this production is determined we should see the story in a monocular way, rather than working it out for ourselves.
Creon accuses Haemon, betrothed to Antigone, of being “on the woman’s side”, “a tame lapdog, a woman’s plaything”. At one point, we even hear warnings about how women “use their sexuality” to bewitch men. Why not go the whole hog and have Antigone and Ismene discuss empowerment and phallocratic oppression over mugs of herbal tea, while flashing their hairy armpits? Then again, they are Greek, so that might not signify.
The players generally aren’t up to it. Jodie Whittaker, as Antigone, makes little impression. Where’s the pride, the majestic hauteur? Instead, her odd northern accent, suburban blue frock and tones of whiny complaint make her seem more like a character from Coronation Street. Although certain postmodern theorists would have us believe that there is really no qualitative difference between Sophoclean tragedy and proletarian soap opera, most of us feel that there is.
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Christopher Eccleston, as Creon, seems particularly straitjacketed by a colourless interpretation. Dressed in white shirt, tie and grey trousers, he issues his brutal diktats from behind a desk in something like an underground ops room at the Pentagon, surrounded by a posse of paramilitaries. Combined with obvious echoes of the war on terror, this is meant to suggest “American”, which is handy theatre shorthand for “wicked”.
Luke Newberry’s Haemon is a weak and weedy new man, powerfully in touch with his own feelings and sensitive to the plight of wimmin. Constantly offering unwanted advice to Creon, when he is finally rebuffed with some harshness he runs off stage almost in tears. He is clearly supposed to be Nick Clegg.
Of the magnificent choruses, we get only stray, unpoetic lines muttered by bit players as they wander vaguely about in specs, munching on Biros. One good thing here is Jamie Ballard, whose arrival as Teiresias at least raises the dramatic temperature a little.
By this time, Antigone has departed, and we realise that it is Creon, not she, who is the heart of the tragedy. Yet this an unsympathetic and unimaginative rendering of Sophocles’s masterpiece to the end. It reduces all the beauty and complexity to a cold little sermonette, in place of a limitlessly rich drama exquisitely conscious of all the agonising contradictions of human existence, and especially the permanent conflict between individual conscience and the need to obey the law, however imperfect, for the sake of social harmony. Above all, there’s a failure of historical imagination to appreciate any values other than those of our own time.
Antigone
Olivier, National Theatre, SE1
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