'THE BURIAL at Thebes', Seamus Heaney's adaptation of 'Antigone', shifts the focus from the individual to a broader sense of society, and reflects the anthropology as well as the politics inherent in Sophocles' restless, relentless tragedy, writes Peter Crawley.
The war is over, the attacks have subsided, but even as law and order are gradually restored to Thebes, civil unrest continues. Outside the ruined city the body of a traitor, Polyneices, lies unburied as an example to all.
The country's rigid new ruler, Creon, will not be swayed towards mercy by sage counsel or popular opinion. No less inflexible, and emboldened by family loyalty and religious conviction, the traitor's grieving sister Antigone defies the decry and plots to bury her brother.
At the heart of Sophocles' tragedy is a conflict as old as time, one that has been ceaselessly rekindled to reflect the perennial battle between the individual and the state, conformity and rebellion, men and women, youth and age - the list goes on. Whether it was with Jean Anouilh's legendary treatment of the play in 1942, performed despite censorship as an allegory of France under the Vichy government, Brecht's version in 1947, or Tom Paulin's The Riot Act in 1984, or Conall Morrison's Middle-East set adaptation in 2003, Antigone has always been a highly political play for highly politicised circumstances. Whatever fresh insights a 2,500-year-old play can bring to our own realities, an audience comes to Antigone with a familiar sensation: we have been here before.
That may be particularly true for The Burial at Thebes, Seamus Heaney's masterful translation of the play, which is now being staged by the Abbey just four short years since it was premiered on the same theatre's main stage. Originally commissioned from the Nobel laureate for a production that was intended to serve as a high point of the theatre's centenary celebrations, The Burial at Thebes struck many as a significant and striking new version paired with an overpowering, fitful production - one whose dire lack of subtlety culminated with the body of Antigone hung over the stage in a bludgeoning display.
When the play was staged the following year by the Nottingham Playhouse to rapturous reviews, it thickened the suspicion that the Abbey had been dealt a great hand and played it poorly. "Could it be that the definitive production of Heaney's version is to be seen in Nottingham, not our own national theatre?" wondered Deirdre Falvey, arts editor of The Irish Times, in these pages.
Whether or not a gauntlet was thrown down, there is certainly an air of intensity and determination in Patrick Mason's rehearsal room as the director and his company ready their new production for the more modest space of the Peacock, and a sense that the national theatre, now under new management, had unfinished business with The Burial at Thebes.
"Yes, there was," says Mason, as he considers the original production, directed by Lorraine Pintal. "I think it fell victim to something which is very common in the theatre, which is that there are certain directors who simply are not interested in doing the language. They are more interested in visuals - in creating images and in physical staging." He refers to "that dreaded phrase: cutting edge" which he feels prioritises the imagistic over the linguistic. "Language is a primary and highly sophisticated means of communication and I think that has been lost to a degree." Although Heaney himself, genial and diplomatic, has expressed no disappointment with the original production, on a recent visit to rehearsals he seemed freshly encouraged by both the new company and the new theatre.
'I LIKE the idea of a smaller space, a confined space, the intensity of it," he said. "In this one, I felt that the sisters, the family life, the under life of emotion, the devotion to the dead and so on, and the passion, the inwardness of this family group was realised. And the council, the outer life, the parliamentary dimension to Creon's life was also emphasised. I think it was Hegel who said about the distinction in the play - the gods of affection, instinct, family and the gods of order government, public life - those are the two poles around which the play turns. And it seemed to me that in this one they were getting to that very much."
Heaney first adapted Sophocles with The Cure at Troy, his version of Philoctetes for Field Day, where the poet was led, he says, by a pursuit of theme. "It was the conflict in the young man between truth to himself, his own self-respect, and his sense of loyalty to the tribe. In a way there was something analogous there for each person in Northern Ireland, dwelling within their own sense of justice and at the same time a sense of loyalty to the gang." It was that play that gave us the potency of a moment when "hope and history rhyme", its optimism infusing the rhetoric of the peace process.
With Antigone, however, already the subject of various politicised reworkings by Irish writers such as Brendan Kennelly, Aidan Matthews and Paulin, Heaney felt a different impetus was required. "I felt that I couldn't start unless there was some kind of pleasure, challenge, voltage, action, line by line in the damn thing." One breakthrough was the title, significantly shifting the focus from the individual to a broader sense of sacred rites and society. "When I got the thought of calling it The Burial at Thebes," Heaney recalls, "I was energised in a different way, because there's anthropology as much as politics in this play." Another inspiration came from Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's poem, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, when Heaney began to hear the three-beat stress of the poem's lament in the restless opening discussion between the sisters Ismene and Antigone, daughters of Oedipus.
"I thought, okay, that's got an urgency and an eagerness," he says, his hand thumping the table to the metre. "In The Cure at Troy, the main joy I had was in doing and redoing the choruses. But this time, in every speech, I had some sense of working with a metrical form, or a metrical norm. There's a three-beat line for the sisters, then there's an Anglo-Saxon style line for the choruses, there's iambic blank verse for Creon, and so different pacings are possible . . . Robert Frost said you have to have the sound of sense in verse, and I think in particular in dramatic verse that is called for. The thing has to be written in such a way that it requires to be spoken."
HEANEY MAY not see himself as a playwright - "a playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it: my versioning was strictly verbal" - but Mason thinks a greater theatricality has been made possible by Heaney's words. "The language is very tough, very muscled and tensile," says the director. "That has meant a deal of compression. But in that compression he's highlighted the psychological hints of the original and foregrounded them in a very clever way. That has made it a wonderfully actable play, with a firm psychological basis."
In 2004, with the invasion of Iraq barely a year old, the play's political allusions may have seemed more strident, with Creon early echoing George Bush's ultimatum, "Whoever isn't for us is against us". While Heaney was certainly alive to contemporary parallels, where the fretful chorus of Theban elders could sound like "the daunted American electorate" while patriotism and betrayal had become "high-voltage terms", such associations were intended more as grace notes than stresses.
"I probably made a mistake even mentioning Bush [ in interviews] at that time," considers Heaney, "because there was enough there. It's far better that the audience gets it. And actually Creon has to be given his due. One of the things about this production is that in the weighting between Creon and Antigone, their two cases, their two passionate natures, one is not parodied, or caricatured as brutal, law-and-order, crackdown villain and the other civil righter, ill-done-by victim, Antigone. It's a much more balanced situation. And it should be."
Mason, whose production is set during the aftermath of the second World War, a context somewhere between the distant and immediate, agrees: "They were made for each other," he says. "The old thing about Greek plays, where character is fate, you see it working here. Every moment where there could be a reconciliation, where there might be another outcome, it's this interaction of character that shifts it into a disastrous path." Such is the balancing act involved with the staging of an enduring classic, which in Heaney's version is as timeless as it is timely. The Abbey may have unfinished business with The Burial at Thebes, but for as long as concepts of loyalty, society, civil rights and justice exist, the world will have unfinished business with Antigone. As our interview draws to its close, Mason again considers the duty of doing justice to Heaney's version. "It's such an important work," he says. "If we did not quite achieve it in the time before, let's at least try to do right by it this time around."
The Burial at Thebes runs at the Peacock theatre, Dublin, from Tues, Apr 8 to Sat, May 3