I was gripped by Antigone at the National Theatre tonight but that may have had more to do with the strength of Sophocles' play than the strengths of this particular production. King Creon and his advisers are depicted here more as managers and bureaucrats than as the military dictators that Sophocles would seem to have created. That may be a comment on the way in which military might is commonly exercised today, as the initial recreation of the US Government's viewing of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in the opening scene of this production would seem to imply. While that is theoretically a genuinely scary perception (Assad rather than Gadaffi, for example), here the look and feel of the office set and costumes meant that the petty bureaucratic tyrannies of a David Brent were also in view and may have underminded to some extent the forces Sophocles unleashes through the play.
I was left wondering from where those forces arose. On one level, Creon makes an ill-advised decision which he then feels obligated to enforce as to back down would undermine his authority which he assumes, as King, is and must be absolute. Sophocles would then seem to be critiquing absolutist approaches to power and advocating greater responsiveness from those with power to those who are governed. Yet the same stubborn insistence in following through an initial decision that is criticised in Creon also characterises Antigone's actions and these are presented, within this production at least, as fairly unambiguously heroic. The difference then would seem to be, in part, that one stubbornly follows the wrong course of action while the other stubbornly follows the right course of action. Yet that, by itself, is relatively banal.
The greater sense of tragedy comes partly from the sense that it is the combination of both the wrong and right stubbornnesses that create the inevitability of the tragedy and also the sense that this inevitability is either the judgement of the Gods on Creon, as prophesied by Creon, or an outworking of the curse on the family, the doom which befalls three generations across the Theban plays. This latter sense of Sophocles' tragic conception sits least easily with the contemporary managerial setting of this production and may well be what creates the greatest sense of disjunction between events and setting.
Before seeing this production, I had had a conversation in which a literature lecturer spoke of contrasting Greek tragedy with Biblical narratives. The latter, because they have 'happy' endings are seen as comedic narrative structures rather than as tragedies. This is despite in some cases using essentially the same plot elements. The contrast is instructive. The story of Daniel and the Lion's Den, for example, begins in essentially the same manner as Antigone in that a King enacts a law which is then deliberately broken leading the King to feel compelled to put to death the one who is the lawbreaker. In the biblical version of the story, however, God supernaturally saves the lawbreaker whereas, in Sophocles' version, the gods punish Creon through the deaths of all those he loves. Similarly, the biblical story of David and Bathsheba, in the confrontation between David and the prophet Nathan, parallels the confrontation between Creon and Tiresias in Antigone. The difference is that David repents of his wrong actions as a result of Nathan's intervention whereas Creon resists Tiresias until the point as which his attempt to redress the situation is too late. In the David and Bathsheba story, David does not escape the (still severe) consequences of his actions because of his repentance but does avoid the total meltdown that Creon experiences and which leaves him with nothing and as nothing. The biblical narratives consistently uncover hope in despair which is why they are, as J.R.R. Tolkien phrased it, eucatastrophes rather than tragedies.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sixteen HorsePower - I Seen What I Saw.
No comments:
Post a Comment