ANTIGONICK

Antigonick is Anne Carson's rewriting of Sophocles' Antigone. Weaving together quotations of all kinds and direct addresses to Antigone from our twenty-first-century vantage point, the text brings out a tragicomic theatricality devoid of divine agency, making the heroine’s fate all the more poignant. In Laëtitia Pitz’s staging, fragments of Robert Garnier’s sixteenth-century Antigone surface throughout, interweaving with Carson’s language to conjure a figure at once archaic and modern, haloed in a distinctive light. Beneath the clash between Creon and Antigone, Pitz reveals another, more intimate drama: that of a family destroyed from within by the violence of power. In her unyielding resolve to bury her dead whatever the cost, Antigone becomes the embodiment of the bonds that bind us to one another, resisting any attempt to subsume them under the rationalizing imperatives of human society.

On stage, three actresses tell the story, in the here and now of the theatrical space, whose presentness is never allowed to recede from view. From Carson’s writing emerges the figure of Nick, whose presence calls to mind Sarah Kane’s yearning for silence and Samuel Beckett’s world of exhaustion. Nick may also be the spanner in the works of our relentless hunger for meaning: a pure gratuity, free from the need for justification.

Alongside them, a musical ensemble led by Norwegian composer Christian Wallumrød, featuring keyboards, percussion, aulos and voice, moves between echoes of early music and sudden eruptions of electronic sound. The score is at once elegiac and visceral, carrying the text forward even as it follows a trajectory of its own.

At the intersection of these many layers, the story unfolds neither in a mythical past nor in some far-off, exotic elsewhere, but in an ever-present now. Here, Antigone flickers in and out of view, at once elusive and within reach. Her presence at our side, at once intimate and haunting, brings us face to face with the only question that truly matters: how can we remain true to our humanity when doing so may cost us our lives?