DIONYSUS VOLUMES I III OMNIBUS EDITION

Antigone in the nineteen nineties

You might say, looking at the newspapers these days, that there are so many Greek plays on that a new situation has arisen. Lots of people out there (not necessarily people studying Greek plays for academic purposes) are going to see them, and it's happening in the commercial theatre in a way that hasn't been at all the norm until until about ten years ago. It has been building up in a very interesting way. That makes a difference to the way in which we look at how a Greek play is received by its audience. Antigone, however, is special, because it has always been one of the alltime greats. It was one of the most popular plays in antiquity; we know it was revived many times; it was very highly regarded in ancient times, and in the modern world, certainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it has been a play of enormous influence and importance. So if people who were not interested in the ancient world for any special purpose, like studying for A level or a degree, were asked what famous Greek plays they could name, Antigone would be one which would immediately occur to them. We have to ask ourselves how it is that this play in particular is such an extraordinarily live kind of play, and how it has fresh meanings for every new generation. Every decade people find new things in it. And we also have to look at the ways in which Sophocles contrived to make it accessible to so many different kinds of reader, and different actors and directors. Actors and directors are readers who are particularly often sensitive to how this dramatic happening can actually work, and we can learn a lot by comparing different productions, just as at the moment it is possible to see two productions of Euripides' Ion, a play that has not been staged in London since anyone can remember, unlike Antigone, which is put on a great deal of the time in one or other form. It is a play which has been extraordinarily often used in political circumstances. It is, perhaps, the most political plays of surviving Greek tragedy. There are several others which have a lot to say about politics, like Aeschylus' Eumenides, but Antigone perhaps is usable in so many different situations that people find themselves confronting. You may, remember there was a television production of The Theban Plays of Sophocles some years ago which attracted quite a lot of attention, and someone I know who talked to the people who made those programmes, said the actors thought Antigone was all about Greenham Common. That was what it meant then in the eighties; that was how they related it to their own lives. I would be very interested to know what the current production feels is the most immediate kind of modern situation that Antigone relates to. Perhaps we shall find in the production that some analogies are suggested to us, or occur to us independently simply because of what we are reading in the papers or seeing on the television. Antigone has always been seen as a very subversive play, a play that could be dangerous. I believe that it was going to be put on in Athens when the Colonels took over in the 1960s and it was banned because it looks like a play resisting the power of tyrannical government. It was going to be put on in Prague when the Russians came

in the Prague Spring, and it was dropped there. And it was used in adaptation in South Africa to say something about apartheid. So it has this amazing capacity to have meaning for people in their own particular circumstances and in their own particular situations. But it does not always get perceived as a political play, although that has been such a recurrent feature of the way in which it has been used. It also has been seen very often in terms of personal relations: of Antigone's own subjective experience very much in the focus (of course Sophocles lived long before feminism, but it has been natural enough for this play to be read in feminist terms, and that is one way in which the subject can be approached). It is possible to read it in very romantic terms (in Cl7th France, it was adapted in such a way to have a very strong emphasis on the impending marriage of Antigone and Haemon, and in a play by a man called Rotrou, Haemon comes back on stage at the end of the play for his dying act instead of committing suicide offstage as he does in Sophocles. It is possible to make much as many scholars have done of a quasierotic relationship between Antigone and her brother. One of the things that people often have wanted to do is to emphasise Antigone as martyr, that kind of isolated individual St. Joan figure defying male authority, defying public institutions. That has been very much a feature of C20th readings of Antigone. But scholars are inclined today to emphasise that in the Athenian world that generated this drama, and for which Sophocles was composing, Antigone might have been seen as a much more transgressive kind of figure, much more threatening than we see her as being, Creon certainly sees her as being very threatening, and he formulates it as a very strong man/woman antagonism. He hates the idea of being threatened or in any way challenged by a woman. What I find interesting here is that there is something rather paradoxical. It is composed for a society which is heavily maledominated, where women don't have the vote, don't have any public role apart from priestesses in some cults but otherwise they ate very much confined to the domestic scene they don't have the prospect of being able to make a career for themselves; they don't have the prospect of being able to choose their own lifestyle; they are very much secondclass citizens, and so it is interesting that for that kind of an audience that takes those things for granted, you have a figure like Antigone who says some very independent and challenging things. Now, it is not just a little slice of life taken out of the everyday experiences of the Athenians. There is no reason to suppose that there were contexts in which actual Athenian women talked in the way that Antigone does in this play, or Medea does in her play, and yet the audiences must have found something to relate to in this figure of Antigone. They must have found it exciting, or challenging, but not just perplexing or threatening to have Antigone making these challenges to Creon. I think there is a way of approaching that question, which I shall come to in a minute. But I want to place this behaviour of Antigone, this presentation of the role of Antigone, in the context of other characters in Greek drama who are extremely weak in literal terms, that is to say that they are for example like Hecuba in The Trojan Women she is old, she is widowed, she is a captive, she loses all her nearest and dearest, she is about to be carted off with the Greeks back to Greece to become the slave of Odysseus. You might say Hecuba has lost absolutely everything. Troy is being burned down at the time this play is taking place. There couldn't be a worse scenario for Hecuba. But Hecuba has the leading part in the play. Hecuba's part is the star role which will be taken by the lead actor, and she dominates the play she does the singing and the wonderful speeches, and has all the best lines, just as Antigone has the best lines in this play. What I am trying to emphasise is that we should get some benefit from looking at Antigone not just as a great solo figure who challenges the authority of the ruler, but also as a weak person by definition, being a weak young woman who has no power, who has been caught doing something contrary to the law, and who is about

to be executed what power does she have? What she has is the power to speak, to bear witness to what is happening, to cause the audience, both within the play and outside it, to witness her suffering and her experience. This is a very exciting phenomenon of Greek tragedy, that it is extremely interested in the paradox of these weak figures, who also have the tremendous authority to utter truths to the audience that the audience has to go away and think about, and be moved by, and be perhaps in some indirect way very profoundly influenced by. It is not just women. You can think of Prometheus chained to the rock on the mountain side and the way in which he is both the obviously weakest figure in the whole play, and yet he is the one who has the power and authority in what he says, and how he shapes our understanding. I think Antigone is that kind of figure. Creon is a very important figure in the play. Creon has a large number of lines, he is there right to the end of the play, quite a long time after Antigone has committed suicide in the cave. He is also someone who excites pity at the end of the play (or I think should do) for the appalling burden of suffering that he carries, and his consciousness that he brought it on himself, what is more. And so, it isn't a question of the play just being about issues that you can extract from it and put in very abstract kinds of terms, and say "here is Antigone, who is challenging on the part of the individual all the tyrannical authority of the state", nor can you say it is just about the conflict between public and private duties, or between the gods of the city and the gods of the family. There are all sorts of polarities, which people have tried to find as the key to what this play was about. I think the interesting thing is that there is no single formula that actually works for the play. There is a contrast between man and woman; there is a contrast between what the city demands and what the family deserves in terms of the burial of the brother who has been a traitor; there is a real problem concerned with loyalties and values, but at the same time you can't extract the issues from the play and say: there they are and this is what they mean, and they can't mean anything else. This is why the play goes on being rereadable, reapplicable to so many different situations. I don't suppose what the Colonels in Athens or the regime in South Africa that was imposing apartheid, and the Russians who were rolling in their tanks into Prague were doing was all that comparable with one another, but Antigone could make sense in those different situations. And in many other situations the play can be felt to have great contemporary relevance. I think the reason why it is so openended, and so extraordinarily appealing to us as readers or audience or actors, is that there are so many features of it that Sophocles leaves us to work out and construct for ourselves, or somehow with his guidance try to fill in. I shall just in the short time that I've got left suggest one or two examples. Take the scene where Ismene is claiming to have worked with Antigone, when she says to Creon that she took part in the burial. We know that she sympathised with Antigone's point of view in the prologue. We have actually seen the prologue we know what Ismene has said, and when she says that she has taken part in it, we know that she is not absolutely correct, because she tried to dissuade Antigone. But we know that she very much sympathised with Antigone, and we can very much understand her wish to be identified with Antigone, and her fear of being left without her sister. Antigone rejects this and says no, you didn't, and critics have argued with absolutely no hope of persuading one another that either it is because Antigone wants all the glory for herself, it is a martyr's response to Ismene, or that Antigone is trying to shield Ismene, that despite her disappointment, she is attached to her sister and wants her sister not to suffer the same fate that she suffers herself. I have seen this done in such a way as to make possible both readings, and we might see yet another one this evening for all I know. The interesting thing is

that the words are sufficiently openended, allow a sufficiently imaginative response on the part of the reader and actor, as to give great richness to this text. What about Haemon? When Haemon comes in and defends Antigone, says to Creon of course you don't hear anything, because you, Creon, are king and people don't tell you everything that is going on. (We know from the way the guard has spoken that they have every reason to be careful, because they get into very serious danger if they do stand up to Creon.) So, Haemon says 1 have the ear of the citizens, and they say that Antigone deserves reward, not punishment for what she has done. Now, we have absolutely no means of telling whether that is true or not. There is no way of establishing it. There is nothing behind the words on the page to tell us what did the Theban people really say, because this is all part of the text's construction. We can understand that Haemon would say that, wouldn't he?, because he loves Antigone and he doesn't want her to be executed. But we might also feel, that's what we would say. We can't be sure that this is simply rhetoric on Haemon's part in order to talk Creon round. There is an engaging sort of strategy here on the part of the dramatist to make us involved in trying to create and recreate the atmosphere in which these events are taking place. Similarly (not quite the same thing because it is not about motivation) the burial. This is one of the most interesting things that Sophocles does, to my mind. What Sophocles does is to create a situation which seems to be very close to the experiences of those people in the C5th BC. We know that it was an historical fact that traitors at Athens could be denied burial in their own territory because of having taken arms against their own city, and we suspect from various pieces of evidence that this was a rather problematic question: what do you do with traitors once you have executed them? We know also that there was no reason why the family of such a person should not discreetly take away the body and give it perfectly proper burial somewhere outside the territory of Attica. This possibility is not raised in the text of Sophocles' play: it is either burying Polyneices, or leaving that body to rot, to create terrible pollution in the city, to be a very dangerous presence. That is something which would never have been allowed to happen in a Greek city. What you do if you execute somebody for perfectly legal reasons, and also have legal reasons for not allowing the burial, is to throw the body out so that it is outside your territory and will not pollute it, will not bring all kinds of bad results from that offence to the gods lying around, because it was one of the basic principles of what the Greeks believed to be civilised order, that you buried the dead. But okay if it is not in your city. Now, nobody in the play is allowed to suggest why don't we just throw Polyneices out? Why don't a few friends and relations go and pick up that body, take it away discreetly? Nobody will ever know anything more about it. That is simply not allowed as a possibility within the action of the play. The reason is to make the situation very stark and also very ambiguous for the audience, because the audience ought to feel two contradictory feelings at the same time: one is that Creon is within his rights to insist on the legal position that he's taking up, because it was in accordance with attitudes that they were used to, and there is no suggestion that he is not properly legitimate as the successor to his nephews, Eteocles and Polyneices; on the other hand, there is the sense that it is a very disturbing and horrible thing to have this body around not buried, for all kinds of reasons which we don't find it difficult to understand. Therefore the audience is invited to feel uneasy whatever view it might have about law and order, and women not being too big for their boots, and Creon having a perfectly legitimate position and so on. And so it is a way of forcing you to start arguing about it, not allowing you to watch this play and feel oh well, there must be some way of coping with this problem, there must be some way of extracting oneself from this headon collision. Sophocles does not allow us to take that kind of compromising untragic kind of approach. This is what Ismene wants to do, what most of us would want to do, to say we're very sorry about this, but we just can't do anything about it, we don't have the power, and the dead will understand. Or, as I am suggesting, what in real life would happen, that there would be some way of effecting the removal of the body. There is an

extraordinarily clever and subtle way in which Sophocles contrives to make what is going on look absolutely clear, absolutely natural, and yet he is creating a situation which is very special and quite artificial, but it is about real problems. The problems that they argue about are very real ones to do with authority and what your real values are. You will notice how Antigone narrows down the grounds on which she defends herself when she is facing death at the end. She says 1 would only do it for a brother. And earlier she talks as though she would have done it for any of her kin. We have many interesting questions raised as the play goes on. It is not about artificial issues but it is open to many rereadings, and that is what makes it have this extraordinary continuing vitality.