What extraordinary resonance ancient Greek tragedy, with its barbarities and anguished conflicts, has acquired in our own warring times.
Yet despite this fresh translation of Sophocles's Antigone by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who gives the play an unnecessary, new title, Lucy Pitman-Wallace's Nottingham Playhouse production strikes old-fashioned notes.
The Burial at Thebes ranges the tyrannical power of the state against the rebellious individual, when Antigone withstands King Creon by giving her rebel brother Polyneices a proper burial. The play maintained its enthralling grip, thanks to Sopohocles rather than anything poet, actors or director contrived.
Heaney supplies different poetic forms for different character groups, though I did not catch these nuances. While his version sometimes achieves a poetic-dramatic eloquence reminiscent of TS Eliot's The Family Reunion and Murder in the Cathedral, I was often struck by its dissonant lurches between archaisms - 'All, hail,
sister', 'Antigone, child of doom' - and intrusive modernities - 'law and order', 'solidarity', 'yours truly', 'left to cope'.
The heavily robed male and female Chorus, singing, dancing and hand-flinging, sometimes to Mick Sands's music, were unhappily redolent of a mixed-sex callisthenics' class in the 1930s. They lacked a timeless gravity.
Pitman-Wallace's production is characterised by emotional restraint and a stylised quality: its antagonists are not mutually engaged. Their eyes tend to fix upon the audience rather than each other.
Paul Bentall, whose scowling, authoritative Creon, was seized by terrifying eruptions of fury best captures the elemental, Grecian spirit, though when gripped by nemesis, he fails to rise to extremities of grief. Similarly Abby Ford's Antigone misses the right, passionate fervour as she defies Creon, faces death and loss of a life with Sam Swainsbury's subdued Haemon. Hot Greek
tragedy cooled down.
Until 29 September (0845 120 7550).
The Burial At Thebes
Barbican: The Pit
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
