Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Search for the soul of Antigone

Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Search for the soul of Antigone:

One consideration, however, was weighing heavily in favour of a new start. Early in 2003 we were watching a leader, a Creon figure if ever there was one: a law and order bossman trying to boss the nations of the world into uncritical agreement with his edicts in much the same way as Creon tries to boss the Chorus of compliant Thebans into conformity with his. With the White House and the Pentagon in cahoots, determined to bring the rest of us into line over Iraq, the passion and protest of an Antigone were all of a sudden as vital as oxygen masks.

…

Antigone is poetic drama, but commentary and analysis had turned it into political allegory. What I wanted to point up was the anthropological dimension of Sophocles’ work: I didn’t want the production to end up as just another opportunistic commentary on the Iraq adventure, and that was why I changed the title.

I called my version The Burial at Thebes partly because “burial” signals immediately to a new audience what the central concern of the play is going to be: a contest involving the rights of the dead and the laws of the land. But mainly I changed the title because “burial” is also a word that has not yet been divorced from primal reality. It still recalls to us our destiny as members of a mortal species and reminds us, however subliminally, of the need to acknowledge and allow the essential dignity of every human creature. It implies respect for the coffin, wherever it is being carried, whatever flag is draped over it, whatever community is crying out alongside it. It emphasises, in other words, what Hegel emphasised about Antigone, those “Instinctive Powers of Feeling, Love and Kinship” which authority must honour and obey if it is not to turn callous.

God save us from political poets! But I like the last paragraph.

Related posts:

• [What's New for Book-Lovers] Guardian Unlimited Books | News | ‘Our belief is that there will be lots of winners’
• Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Strip lit is joining the literary elite
• What are the top 20 “geek novels”? from Guardian Unlimited: Technology
• Guardian reviewer hates Narnia, Christianity, religion, hateful people
• Excellent Guardian profile of the Open Library