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Antigone at the Lion and Unicorn |
Antigone’s divine tragedy
PREVIEW: ANTIGONE
Lion and Unicorn Theatre
“MISERY! Despair! Suicide!” You can imagine the original billposters for Antigone, Sophocles’s third (though first written) Theban tragedy.
The tale of internecine struggle between Oedipus’s doomed daughter and the tyrannical King Creon has lost none of its ability to shock and unsettle.
The play starts as it means to go on: with grief.
Antigone and her sister, Ismene, are in mourning for their two brothers killed during the recent civil war.
One brother, Eteocles, has been interred as a hero; the body of the other, Polyneices, who fought for the rebels, has been left to rot in the sun.
An edict issued by Creon states that anyone who attempts to give the dissident a proper burial will be put to death.
Ignoring Creon’s decree and her sister’s pleas, Antigone buries the body. Her filial love comes above her duty to the state.
But in Creon, a man as proud and intractable as you could find in any corridor of power, Antigone has met her match. He places a sentence of death upon her, and in doing so unwittingly condemns his loved ones to the same fate.
Fledgling theatre company Giant Olive plough a traditional furrow through the material, with a few pleasantly unusual touches.
Imogen Harris (pictured), her pitch-black hair braided with purple baubles, gives a sullen Goth teenager edge to Antigone; Craig Tonks adds some light relief as the garrulous corpse-guard; and Simon Mathis as Creon’s son Haemon is excellent, if sadly underused.
Commentating on all the wretched agony of human life is the all-knowing chorus – for the uninitiated, think the 3am Girls in togas and you’ll be close.
As conduits for the divine, though, they are far from alone; everybody seems to have some sort of celestial hotline.
Antigone claims her actions will appease the gods, while Creon believes he is doing their bidding by opposing her.
The true tragedy of the piece – that continues to resonate in an age of jihadist extremism and its “war on terror” response – stems from the characters’ interpretations of heavenly will for their own destructive ends and their hubris in the face of reason, which, like a tree that cannot bow, splits asunder when the levee breaks.
October 9 - 19
020 7485 9897 |
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