When the Barbican announced that their production of Antigone, written by the ancient playwright Sophocles in a translation by Anne Carson and directed by the man-of-the-moment Ivo Van Hove, anticipation began for what was one of the hottest tickets of 2015. It was going to tour all over the world, and to top it off Juliette Binoche (making a return to the London stage) would play the lead role.
So it was all a bit awkward then, that when it opened people found the production to be quite different from what they were expecting. I was one of these people. I found the production to be slow and lacking in focus. I wouldn't have been surprised if, in the rehearsal room, Van Hove just told the actors to "move around a bit" and to "shout that line". It seemed loose and methodical, which is interesting when this is a play about a young woman defying the state to continue the cause of the gods, with two suicides and a government issued burial (whilst alive) all happening within the 90 minute run time. Although the use of Lou Reed's Heroin does deserve special mention: that's one powerful way to end a show, with that discordant lament to the 60s rocker lifestyle blaring as the chorus continue to, well, live.
But as the days passed since I saw it, something began to grow inside the back of my mind. An idea, just a notion of something bigger. Which was weird, because I'd felt my eyes getting heavy when I was actually watching the production. After watching the filmed version of the production on BBC 4, it quickly began to dawn on me, however, just how wrong my thinking about the production was. It wasn't until I sat down to read the programme the following week that I began to appreciate just how bold and powerful Van Hove's reading of the play was, which is summarized in the form of an essay entitled The Unanswered Question - How to Get to the Dark Soul of Antigone. For the rest of this post, I'll put Van Hove's notes in italics, complete with the Greek (as opposed to the traditional Latin) spellings this production employed.
Antigone goes on a long, solitary road towards death. That's interesting. Does Van Hove feel Antigone is fully aware of the fact that she won't survive? Scene by scene, she cuts herself loose: from her sister, who won't help with her brother's burial; from Polyneikes (not sure I fully see this. It's Polyneikes who causes her to do what she does, right until the bitter end); from the love of her fiancé Haimon; from Kreon's policy; and, as an inevitable consequence, from society. This seems to suggest that Van Hove didn't approach the play as a political thriller in which the course of modern democracy is changed forever by the actions of one woman, but views it more as a structurally abstract death-note. When the political aspect is ignored, the play turns into one woman effectively preparing herself for death.
I also love Van Hove's idea that the blind prophet Tiresias acts almost as an anti-Chorus, saying what the actual Chorus are too afraid to: that Kreon is the cause of all of the problems in the play, and not Oedipus, nor Antigone, nor Polyneikes nor Eteokles. In Antigone, the chorus take the form of Kreon's advisers. Their status within the clear political hierarchy of Thebes stops them from fully speaking what they think.
But the most powerful piece of Van Hove's writing comes at the end of his essay: Kreon's efforts to turn around his punishments come too late. By the end of the play his wife, Eurydike, and two sons are dead. Like Antigone, Kreon is 'alone on his insides.' Like many directors, Van Hove is aware of the fact that Kreon ends up in the same position as Antigone. He has lost everything, but has no choice but to keep moving forward into an uncertain future. He has been driven by a sincere ambition to turn Thebes, his beloved city, into a better place and has failed In every scene he is given the chance to adjust his law but he can't. His inflexibility leads to his downfall. The sums up the character of Kreon perfectly: he is a man with a clear sense of morals, and is someone who sticks to his own laws without hesitation, even rejecting Tiresias (and because of this the Gods) until he realises that the prophet actually speaks the truth.
And then, finally, the kicker: Antigone develops from a play about a brutal war to a play about politics and public policies and ends as a play about the helplessness of humans, lost in the cosmos. It is a play about survival: not the survival of an individual or a family, but of a whole society, perhaps even the world. The play is ambivalent and dark, modern and mythical, leaving one with more questions than answers. This could be considered Van Hove's manifesto when approaching the play; to create a production which doesn't follow one woman, but to stage a production which explores the role of every individual in society. To Van Hove, Thebes isn't a city in ancient Greece, but a space metaphoric for every city ever, regardless of time or place. Van Hove was also influenced by the response to the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 being left in an open field for a week, an act which seemed to violate timeless laws of death and the ways through which we honour and respect it. Just like how the Western press criticised all involved with the bodies (until the Dutch government intervened and arranged a 100km funeral procession, almost like the honours bestowed onto Eteokles), Antigone defies Kreon to bury her brother. Van Hove placed the play in a world which was timeless yet grounded in the present, in which Antigone's defying of Kreon's edict is an act of both personal empowerment and political protest, almost akin to the Occupy protesters. And like the war in Iraq, Kreon ignored the advice of his people to avoid showing weakness to his citizens.
At the end of Antigone, the surviving characters are forced to accept that they have no choice but to keep moving forward blindly, past a devastating war and into whatever the future holds. In Anne Carson's translation, a member of the Chorus remarks to a sobbing Kreon: "That's the future, this is the present. You deal with the present." This becomes a parallel to us: we don't know what's coming, but we know what's happened. Wars, a recession, austerity. So we deal about the present, and wait to deal about the future when we're living through it.
This took a while to write, and nearly all of it came from myself, although Van Hove's essay obviously formed the basis. However, the Guardian's article, Death Becomes Her: How Juliette Binoche and Ivo Van Hove Reinvented Antigone was very interesting and is easily available online, and having the production when it was broadcast of BBC 4 recorded also proved to be invaluable.
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