“Everybody should see this play,” said Emma, the stranger sitting and smiling beside me at the end of the performance of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, first performed in Paris in 1944 at a time of German Nazi control of France.
The narrator, impressively performed by Peter Crighton, conversationally opens the play with an obvious reason why Emma’s response might be surprising. He tells us that Antigone is going to die and nothing can be done about it. Creon (Angus Morrison) who rules the country has decreed that the dead body of Antigone’s brother Polynices, who rebelled against the city, must not be buried. Anyone who tries to do so will be executed. Why sacrifice your life for a dead body?
But that’s not the way Antigone sees it. She tells her sister Ismène (Arianna Branca) that she loves life from the moment she wakes up feeling the cold air to being the last in bed, “just to live a bit more of night”. But loving life doesn’t mean abandoning moral principles and disrespecting her brother’s dead body.
In a moving scene, she leans against Haemon (Finnian Smyth), the man she had intended to marry, and softly admits, “I feel secure when I rest my head in the hollow of your shoulder.”
Although we know where this story is going, this clear, fluent production centred on the moral stance of Antigone never loses our attention. We mentally cheer her stance, even as we fear its consequences.
Others, including her sister and Haemon, try to persuade her to give up her dangerous plan. When it’s pointed out that her gesture for the dead brother is pointless because it won't change anything, she recalls other things she has done that might be described in the same way and yet she did them. She says, “I empty my pockets for the beggar on the side of the road who has got nothing.”
Creon, who reveals privately to her that, because of the mutilation of the bodies on the field of battle, he has no idea if the body left on the field is the rebel brother or the loyal brother, ends up walling the living body of Antigone in the tomb meant for the dead, while the rotting body of the brother is left among the living to pollute the city with its smell.
His cruel inflexibility triggers suicides in his own family, discredits his rule and becomes a flag of resistance even to those in the most desperate, hopeless situations.
No wonder it was applauded in 1944 by the French Resistance in occupied Paris. Emma, the stranger sitting beside me at the end of the performance, was right when she said, “everybody should see this play”.