Conall Morrisson has taken Antigone and set it in the conflict-torn present day Middle East. 'It's a kind of historical anthropology, an illuminatedhistory lesson,' he tells Helen Meany
The weight of historical approval might well have crushed Sophocles's Antigone. Hegel and Goethe set the tone for other Enlightened enthusiasts in the 18th century and, ever since, philosophers, artists and scholars have lavished superlatives on the play, elevating it as one of the most sublime works of art created. Thankfully, it has resisted consignment to the category of cultural cod liver oil: this 2,500-year-old verse drama by a great Greek tragedian has a vigorous performance life, its endurance testifying to its qualities as eloquently as any assertions of its brilliance. It is revisited again and again in opera, film and theatre productions, most notably, in the 20th century, by Anouilh, Brecht and Athol Fugard. Closer to home, there have been versions by Yeats, Paulin and Kennelly. It's good for us and we still like it.
First performed in Athens around 441 B.C., Antigone is one of three plays in which Sophocles tells the story of the tragic fate of King Oedipus and his children. It is set after the death of Oedipus, in the immediate aftermath of a battle in which the city of Thebes withstood an attack led by one of Oedipus's sons, Polyneices, against another, Eteocles, in which both were killed. The surviving ruler, their uncle, Creon, decrees that Polyneices's body should remain unburied, to rot in the sun or be devoured by birds and animals. Anyone who disobeyed would be stoned to death.
When Antigone, the sister of the two dead men, defies Creon by sprinkling dust on the body of her beloved brother, Polyneices, she challenges Creon's right to ignore the religious requirement for all bodies to be given full burial rites to ensure their passage into the Underworld. She is prepared to die for her beliefs, arguing that Creon can't put civil law before the law of the gods; he insists that he is acting in the best interests of the city-state and that it would be wrong to honour the body of a traitor. Each acts from high moral principle; each refuses to yield, until it is too late: Antigone dies, along with Creon's son, Haemon (Antigone's betrothed), and his wife, Eurydice, who kill themselves.
Because it dramatises, in extreme form, the clash between the individual conscience and the forces of the state, Antigone has been susceptible to politically engaged interpretations. The conflict is a timeless one - between the public and private realms, between men and women, youth and age, the living and the dead, human and divine - and the contexts to which it is applicable are infinitely varied. Director and playwright Conall Morrison's new touring production for Storytellers Theatre Company (in association with Cork Opera House) is set in present day Middle East, a context which the play, with its clash of two intransigent people, fits "chillingly well", he says.
"We can see the same behaviour patterns today. We are absolutely no further forward. The difference is that we're armed to the teeth and the collateral damage has the capacity to be so vast. Two people clash and everybody loses. It's a situation that's infinitely more urgent now."
His aim is to look at the play through the lens of a contemporary political situation, while remaining as faithfully Sophoclean as possible. "It's a kind of historical anthropology, an illuminated history lesson. It's an invitation to think about eternally recurring human problems."
A specially commissioned score by Conor Linehan will function as an equivalent to the music used in ancient Greek theatre, bolstering the density of the choral odes. It's one of the many collaborations between Linehan and Morrison, in an ongoing exploration of music theatre.
"Music, like masks and spectacle, is one of the ways we have of animating the energies of Greek tragedy," Morrison says. "Music expresses the human spirit, the indefinable aspects of human nature. The answer to the battle between Antigone and Creon is in the music. It represents the individuality of the human soul and the transcendent, the sacramental."
The production will also include projected images of conflict in the Middle East, which form a backdrop to the action. Acknowledging the danger of being too reductive in the setting, Morrison explains the rationale. "We experience these current events through media, through images that are edited, or commodified into works of art. So this production is asking questions about the difficulty of telling the story, the difficulty of honest communication. I'm not shying away from the complexities. I'm interested in looking at the representation of suffering. You've got to look at form as well as content when you're trying to tell truthful stories."
He has been immersed in the text for months, having realised early on that the many available translations were so divergent that he needed to create his own. As he grappled - without any knowledge of Greek - with Sophocles's subtle, intensely concentrated poetry and the ever-expanding body of scholarly exegesis, he came to appreciate fully a work which he had previously respected for its canonical status rather than loved.
"It's a structural masterpiece. With all the different rhyme schemes, it represents psychological complexity through form. It has a fully organic aesthetic in which form is allied to content beautifully. It's a mix of the poetic, the rhetorical, and an almost [David] Mamet-style of speedy storytelling, in which characters are revealed through action.
"As I began to see the levels of subtext, the intricacy of the writing and the complexity of the dramaturgy, I was left with an ever-deepening respect for Sophocles."
Forging his own version of the text was "a superb experience", he says. "For a director, it gives you so many ways into it, through the different linguistic registers. But still it's a work that reveals its many secrets on the floor of the rehearsal room, and like all good plays, it's a real blueprint."
He first wrote a free translation, then returned and rewrote each line. "I tried to find the essence, what to my mind and to my ear is the most truthful, alive, representation."
The result is a supple, immediate script, which captures the vivid lyricism of the choral odes, as well as the urgency of the exchanges between the characters, including the seer, Tiresias, who predicts the tide of griefs that are about to engulf Creon and advises him to relent: "All men make mistakes but if a man can learn and turn and heal, he is not lost. He is wise. He is lucky."
The necessity of listening, learning and acquiring wisdom is a recurring theme of Antigone, which Morrison's version emphasises. "The play demonstrates the inevitable failure of language, because there's a failure of the empathetic and sympathetic imagination. Unless the quality of listening is equal to the quality of speaking, there can be no understanding. The play is an invitation to keep stepping back, keep listening."
His reduction of the chorus of Theban elders to a single actor throws the arguments of the play into relief and traces the emotional journey of the characters very clearly. "The chorus gives us an opportunity to show the mind in motion, to focus on the psychology of how people respond to argument, the way they become emotionally involved.
"All of the characters are utterly principled, and the way they are presented is an attempt to diminish their subjectivity. But their principled stands are actually motivated by personal, emotional problems and issues - and the Chorus is in the thick of it."
Morrison's insistence on the characters' underlying emotional reactions rather than on the abstract argument they present fits with his rejection of masks of detachment and his determination to create an Antigone that engages with our world.
"I'm not interested in some spurious universality. I want to wipe away the accretions of centuries and showthat it's of the moment. This is not just for classicists: the world is in the grip of huge mythical conflicts at present and unless we understand how myth works we're in trouble.
"There's an instinct within us as young playwrights, artists, directors, to stay shy of excessive engagement. The besetting sin of our generation is to be cynical, sarcastic, ironic, always to have a get-out clause. But if art is to be meaningful to people it must help to animate the problems that are very current.
"And of course," he adds, "Antigone will survive me."
Antigone opens on Thursday at Town Hall Theatre, Galway, before touring to Wicklow Arts Centre (Feb 19th-22nd); Cork Opera House (Feb 25th-March 1st); and Project, Dublin (March 4th-15th).