Acts of War

Few narratives have been adapted for the stage as often as the legend of Antigone. Each generation reinvents the myth to fit its own circumstances; the last century alone has produced scores of Antigone plays, operas, and films. At the center of Sophocles’ original play is a struggle to reconcile personal beliefs with the needs of society. At no time is this question more relevant than in periods of war, so it is not surprising that new adaptations of Antigone cluster around times of national conflict.

The first Antigone of the twentieth century was born from the horror of the First World War. The poet and dramatist Walter Hasenclever was fighting in the German army when he suffered a wound that kept him hospitalized for a year. While recuperating he wrote several political plays, including an Expressionist Antigone that still reverberates with outrage at the grotesque injustices of the war. Hasenclever replaced Sophocles’ monolithic Chorus with a cacophony of individual voices, identified only by such labels as “Citizen,” “Youth,” and “the Man of the People.” This Chorus of Everymen is passionate but weak, and is easily swayed by the arguments of Antigone and Creon. Towards the end of the play, Hasenclever’s broken Creon willingly relinquishes his power to the people of Thebes, but his democratic gesture is subverted when a supernatural voice announces that God has already passed judgment upon the city. The play ends with a vision of the apocalypse as thunder and lightning merge with a chorus of anguished screams.

World War II brought two major adaptations of Antigone, by Jean Anouilh and Bertolt Brecht. Anouilh’s Antigone trod a fine line between political compromise and revolt. It was first staged in Paris during the Nazi occupation, and any anti-tyrannical sentiment had to be carefully disguised since the audience was thick with German officers. Anouilh accomplished this by reducing the scope of the play to a domestic drama. His Antigone is a wild-eyed, scraggly-haired fanatic, motivated more by familial love than by fear of divine wrath, while his Creon is a man who simply did what was needed to hold the State together in the wake of Polynices’ rebellion. In Anouilh’s play, Creon does everything possible to save Antigone from herself. He tries to persuade her that Eteocles and Polynices were little better than gangsters squabbling over the prize left by their father’s self-destruction, and that the body Antigone assumed to be Polynices was simply the more mutilated of the two corpses, the other having been salvaged for an elaborate State funeral. Antigone is resolute, however, and strides to a glorious death, her head held high. Both French Resistance fighters and Nazi officers found plenty to praise in this Antigone that eschewed simple answers to difficult moral and ethical questions.

Bertolt Brecht first produced his version of Antigone in Switzerland in 1948. Performed in a neutral country after the end of the Second World War, Brecht’s Antigone is a vehement and uncompromising attack on tyranny. His Creon is a consummate manipulator, who ordered the two brothers to mount an attack on Argos, during which Polynices deserted and was killed by Eteocles. Brecht uses the Antigone myth as a platform for his economic philosophy. His Chorus expresses concern for the wartime metal shortage in Thebes, and repeatedly asks when the treasure-wagons from Argos, led by Creon’s firstborn son Megareus, will arrive. Creon’s final downfall is magnified by the news that Argos has launched a counterattack, and that neither Megareus nor his the treasure-wagons will ever pass through the seven gates of Thebes.

In 1967 Brecht’s adaptation of Antigone was in turn adapted by Judith Malina, co-founder of the experimental Living Theatre in New York, while she was in prison for political protest. Malina replaced Brecht’s naturalistic prologue with a dance composition representing the battle between Thebes and Argos. The actors of the Chorus chanted and droned before dividing into antagonistic groups and circling each other in ritualistic dance. In a political gesture designed to provoke comparisons with the contemporary Vietnam War, the audience of Malina’s Antigone was forced to enter the dramatic action, functioning as members of the Argive army that was attacking Thebes.

More recently, Croatian playwright Miro Gavran has produced an Antigone that dramatizes the tyranny and political corruption of the war-torn Balkans. InCreon’s Antigone (1990), a modern despot, Creon, is holding a timid and confused girl, Antigone, prisoner in an underground bunker. He plans to force her to participate in the production of a play – remarkably similar to Sophocles’ Antigone – that will end in her onstage death. Antigone reads the script and is so inspired by the bravery of her fictional counterpart that she refuses to take part in Creon’s drama and commits suicide. Creon exits chuckling, pleased that his true goal, the removal of this girl who challenges his regime, has been accomplished.

Though these twentieth-century adaptations of Antigone differ widely in style and theme, they all have their source in Sophocles’ play. The text of the original Antigone is like a prism – turn it one way or another and different colors shine through. The ancient war between Argos and Thebes has developed an archetypal quality in this age of international conflict, where our domestic lives are so frequently disrupted by events on the global political stage.

Kyle Brenton is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.