Antigone may not share the fame of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, but it forms a worthy close to the trilogy of Theban plays; whereas Oedipus is, to some extent, the unwitting plaything of the gods, both Antigone and Creon, Oedipus’ successor as king, find themselves locked in a human-manufactured dilemma. After a battle in which both of Antigone’s brothers have died, Eteocles defending Thebes and Polynices leading the attacking army, Creon has decreed that Polynices’ body must lie unburied and subject to the attentions of carrion. He places a death sentence on anyone who defies his decree, and thus starts the tragic events of the play: Antigone cannot suffer such an affront to divine laws, and therefore defies Creon by burying her brother, setting in motion the rest of the tragic events.
From the outset of the production at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, we feel that Thebes is an exhausted, badly divided city. The very floor of the theatre is cracked like Doris Salcedo’s ‘Shibboleth’ in Tate Modern, the costumes, from Creon’s down, are either grubby or shine with a patina of overuse, and actors rarely converse, preferring to direct monologues somewhere in each other’s vicinity,. Whilst the latter is effective at times, particularly when Ian Redford’s Creon is confronted by Tiresias, it needs a stronger actor than Matti Houghton to make the audience empathise with Antigone. Although Houghton warms up as the evening goes on, she never really manages to convince either that she is Antigone or that Antigone’s tragedy is something we should particularly care about. Thus the play shifts focus and becomes more about Creon and his hubristic tragedy, with the news of Antigone’s death severely lacking in the impact it should have.
Perhaps this is not altogether accidental. From the moment he enters proferring gratuitous handshakes to audience members, Creon is clearly supposed to be identified as a modern politician, Bush or perhaps Blair, an autocrat deaf to the appeals of others. This is clumsily reinforced by the decision to dress the soldier in desert combat fatigues familiar from footage of the Gulf Wars, as if Greg Hersov is desperate not to leave anything to the imagination, and feels that by focusing on Creon, he can make the play relevant to the modern day (an idea reinforced by the translation’s references to torture and focus on enemies of the state). This is wasted effort. Greek tragedies are always relevant, but they suffer for having extra layers of meaning imposed upon them by directors who think audiences can’t see parallels without having them highlighted for them.
However, nothing in this production is quite as redundant as the modern dance interludes, where a dancer in a fireman’s uniform straight from 9/11 writhes on the floor, mimes a primal scream, imitates a tree in the breeze etc. These sections are little short of excruciating, accompanied by a silence that feels less respectful than embarrassed, like when you go to a wedding and the father of the bride doesn’t know when to shut up. The only possible reason could be to pad out the time so that theatregoers don’t feel cheated by the short 1 hour and 45 minute time of the play, but instead they leave you feeling cheated by the dissipation of the play’s intensity.
Although Hersov’s direction makes good use of the Exchange as a theatre space, with the moments when the shabby chorus deliver lines from the audience making it feel like an amphitheatre, the play overall is let down by its need to be modern and urgent. Leaving a Greek tragedy, your sense of release should be a cathartic one from the play itself, not one of gratitude that you don’t have to suffer another dance.