Antigone: The Burial at Thebes (Furies) runs from April 30 – May 4
at the Tap Gallery. By Sophocles, translated by Seamus Heaney, directed by Chris
McKay.
One of the first questions I ask when it comes to restaging
classic works like Antigone is the question of relevance. Why this play?
Why now? What is the significance? Of course, “interesting intellectual
exercise” is a perfectly valid reason, but for a play to truly strike the mark,
there needs to be some sort of resonance.
In this sense, if one has only the canon of Greek tragedy to
choose from, Antigone was a smart choice to put on. The figure at its
heart, Antigone (played in the performance I saw by Krystiann Dingas, who is
alternating the role with Emilia Stubbs Grigoriou), is a fascinating,
complicated heroine. Forbidden by the patriarchy of Thebes, the city of which
she was once princess, to bury her brother Polyneices, she is defiant,
unapologetically seizing agency. It is a fascinating portrait of a woman in
rebellion against an unfriendly society: something which I think many women
relate to quite viscerally.
Antigone is portrayed as heroic – that word is explicitly
used in this translation by great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. She places honour
above everything else, even her own life. Honour is a character trait most
often coded masculine (and, indeed, Antigone’s sister Ismene cannot live up to
this standard), as is filial devotion. But Antigone is most definitely a female
character: subverting patriarchy by asserting agency. This dynamic is one I
find so, so interesting, especially considering how many thousands of years old
this play is.
It’s a shame, then, that although Antigone is the title
character, the play is mostly about Creon, the patriarch whom she defies. This
can’t really be helped, given the ancientness of the play, but Creon is
significantly less interesting than his niece. The second half of the play is
mostly about his man-pain, and it’s nowhere near as powerful as the first –
although it is very interesting to see how the patriarchy deals with being destabilised
by a defiant woman, something Heaney highlights brilliantly in his translation.
I’ve talked so far about the play: let’s focus now on the
production. It is a good one, but not a great one. I wasn’t ever bored, and the
cultural idiosyncrasies of Greek theatre were translated well to the modern
stage. (I wasn’t entirely sure what the relationship of the chorus character,
played by Peter Jamieson, to Creon was supposed to be, but it wasn’t that
big a concern.) All in all, it was a very tidy one and a half hours of theatre.
However, it was a bit awkward and one note in places, and I felt it could have
been imbued with significantly more nuance. Several characters fell victim to
declaiming, pronouncing their long monologues with great gusto but only one
emotional level. This was particularly true of Brendan Layton’s Creon, who was
hard to get a handle on. His emotional arc was clear from his words but not
necessarily from his acting: he went from autocratic! to angry! to sad! without
very much in the way of transition.
Because the play had this very flat emotional trajectory, it
made it very hard to connect with. I was talking about it afterwards with my
theatre date, and he said that, “I believed that they [the actors] felt it, but
I didn’t feel it.” I agree completely. More care needed to be taken with the
show’s emotional tapestry for it to be truly affective for the audience.
(Also, the bit with Tiresias really doesn’t work at all. It
verges on the parodic: Tiresias is played by Peter Bertoni as a kind of
caricature of a prophet. And whoever decided to put him in a luminescent orange
toga really isn’t doing him any favours, especially since everyone else in the
play is dressed in modern clothes.)
Overall, though, I think this was a solid production of a
difficult play. I very much enjoyed Krystiann Dingas’ performance as Antigone,
and I’d be very interested to see how Emilia Stubbs Grigoriou, who was fabulous
as Ismene, does in the same role. The most interesting part of the show is its
female characters: they are what makes this ancient play resonant and relevant.