This weekend, Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center welcomes Juliette Binoche as Antigone in a new translation by Anne Carson, directed by Ivo van Hove. Sophocles’ Antigone tells the story of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, who defies the law of the city in favor of the law of the gods (as she understands it). With her brothers dead at each other’s hands—one a hero and one a traitor—her uncle Creon the ruler makes a cruel edict: Heroic Eteocles is given all the burial rites a hero deserves, while Polyneices’ body is left to rot.
This proclamation sets into motion the undoing of many. Rigid in their beliefs, the players stand firm. Antigone buries her brother and honors death’s laws, going willingly to her own tomb. Creon sentences her to death, honoring the law of the city, bringing about his own demise.
As has been rehearsed in discussion for ages, Antigone is about the state vs. the family, the law of man vs. the law of the gods. But in a literal sense, Antigone is a play about death and the dead. It’s a play about bodies.
This production makes beautiful images. A projection of unidentified strangers and deserts grounds an otherwise spare stage. A chorus of languid ever-watching statues directs the eye. In two pivotal moments, what we are all looking at is the bodies of the dead.
Carson’s translation is beautifully direct and the actors are compelling, but the images of these bodies are important too. In his director’s note “The Unanswered Question–How to Get to the Dark Soul of Antigone,” Dutchman van Hove points us to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The graphic images of the crash circled the world. The dead of that tragedy were left to rot in the field for over a week, and the world was horrified.
When the bodies were returned to the Netherlands, they were given a funeral procession. In ceremony, in public, the dead were received. To have bodies put away and respected did much to right that wrong. It was crucial not only that the reversal was done, but that it was seen.
In this production, the bodies are on stage. Polyneices, his back marred by putrefaction, is given his burial rites before the audience: not in secret but in shameless full view. The water and the dirt and the smoke are real, as though to tell of the deed alone would rob it of its power. Polyneices smells of death.
Antigone too is a public corpse: not the corpse revealed to Creon hanging by its silk rope, but the white corpse of a morgue. Hers is a sanitized body, which appears to be merely asleep, merely resting. She is a cold image of death, the unnatural image of death with which a modern audience is most familiar.
While Antigone’s death defines the play, it is Creon’s journey into living doom that propels the show. In a talented cast, Patrick O’Kane’s Creon stands out as the poetic thrum giving a prosodic heartbeat to Carson’s vivid text. As the voice of the one who sees and lives on, he makes the images of grief come alive.
Antigone is often reduced to its symbolism. The emotional reality of death is so much more complex and anonymous than that. We can imagine Thebes continues in its quotidian mechanics, aware of the tragedy as a news byte, as something to have an opinion about. But those who see behind the curtain of death, who see these bodies, are subjected to reaction. It is difficult to retreat into a mere opinion when you were there.
Van Hove calls Antigone a play about “the helplessness of humans.” He calls it ambivalent. Perhaps that is the experience of really seeing, and being unable to achieve distance from death. Indeed, this ambivalent production leaves much unsettled, cut short from answers by a curtain closed.
That unsettled, murky presentation is at times confusing. Characters ebb and flow out of their roles. Voices take over words that describe themselves. But they are always part of the picture of grief, and as a whole, that image is compelling if occasionally unclear.
Washington, D.C. is the last stop this production of Antigone, which ends October 25th after its original run at the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg and the Barbican in London, as well as an international tour.
Tara Barnett is a writer in Washington.
