Antigone
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Antigone
Sophocles
Drama
James Mustich
Jul 31, 2018
It is easy to see the battle of wills between Antigone and Creon as a struggle between conscience and power, liberty and tyranny, individual courage and the brutality of the state. Many modern readings of the tale (including mid-twentieth-century restagings by Jean Anouilh and Bertolt Brecht) do so. Yet such an interpretation does not do justice to the complexity of Sophocles’s drama, in which the importance of public allegiance over private fealty is strongly argued. Nevertheless, Antigone’s bravery and the terrifying severity of her conviction make her tower over the calculating Creon, who at last yields to her resolve, too late to prevent calamity for all concerned. In this, as in all of Sophocles’s plays, virtue is as uncertain as circumstance, and no moral impulse is pure; the essence of his tragic figures is their human presence in the midst of incompatible and often overwhelming truths.
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Virginie Tschan
Sep 12, 2021
Nothing better than a classic grec tragedy.
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