Antigone

An extraordinary new play received its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday night.� "Antigone,"�by award-winning playwright Sophocles, has been treated to an Anne Carson translation so alive that its run might be extended for another 2,500 years.
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In this famous story, the two son-brothers of Oedipus, born of incestuous curse by Oedipus and his mother, fight on opposite sides of a Theban civil war and die at each others' hands. Kreon, the King of Thebes who also happens to be the boys' uncle, gives his compliant nephew a proper burial but decrees the traitorous must rot where he fell. There are two sisters who feel differently about the injustice: Antigone -- engaged to marry Kreon's son, cousin Haimon -- will risk capital punishment to bury her brother while Ismene wants to closet all skeletons and attempt a normal life.

Directed by Belgian star Ivan van Hove, the production's opening image underscores the dialectic: Antigone wears all black, Ismene sports a bright-colored skirt. Ismene values her life and its quality more than family, tradition or so-called justice. Antigone has no interest in life on compromised terms. The girls hug but they will never meet minds, and both are empathetic: Who among us does not, in some capacity, face a daily conflict between principles and self-protection?
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Starring Juliette Binoche, as respected for her multi-media chops as she is famous for her Academy Award, Lanc�me modeling and vast filmography, this "Antigone" is a revision of Carson's original "Antigonick" from 2010. For it, Hove asked Carson to "magnify the treatment of Kreon so that he would be able to fill the theatrical and conceptual space of a worthy opponent to Antigone."

Another goal of the revision was to beef up Binoche's stage time. Hove added a silent scene in which we see Antigone tenderly perform the forbidden rites on her brother's corpse in a moment that could have been plucked from the front page. Carson had also been asked to invent a romantic scene between Haimon and Antigone but refused on the grounds that she couldn't "invent language�for�Sophocles or�as�Sophocles." Unfortunately Hove proceeded with his vision in a kiss-over-the-corpse moment between the engaged couple that was one of the play's few unearned and only ridiculous moment.

He had a better idea toward the end. After hanging herself and Haimon's resultant suicide, Antigone makes a posthumous turn as the Messenger. She recaps events to Kreon's wife Eurydike (Kathryn Pogson) while loyal Haimon -- with her in Hades -- listens in.
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For all her star power, Binoche did not stand out; she was but one pillar in this Parthenon of skilled ensemble artists.

Obi Abili as the messenger-you-want-to-kill had impeccable comic timing in trying to tiptoe around Kreon. Patrick O'Kate as Kreon was perhaps a bit one-sided but had great villainous style. His father-son collision with Haimon, played with command, restraint and sweetness by Samuel Edward-Cook, was hair-raising. In their dialogue, defenses and demise, Haimon and Antigone's romance took on such rich and heartbreaking dimension, I wondered why Romeo and Juliet have gotten all the star-crossed attention.

Kirsty Bushell as Ismene was understated and believably hard to read; after refusing to aid and abet Antigone, would she really have gone to the grave with her sister? Likewise did Antigone refuse to let her plead guilty because she was protecting her sister, or because she wanted the martyr's credit?
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While not without stumbles, Hove paced the production so well it felt more like a gripping dirge than the variety of Greek revival that has challenged the genre's box office -- histrionics and boredom taking turns. The actors spoke softly and slowly, vessels of the material.

Back to Carson and the play's biggest star: its script. Her words were so clear that even a newcomer to the material would have had a fighting chance at tracking the Oedipal cluster-fuck. This is not to say that Carson dumbed the material down or compromised its poetry in the manner of the 1979 "Book of Common Prayer," for example.

On the contrary her poetry -- the discipline she is most known for -- is stand-alone beautiful and her character renderings feel more complex than in other versions. "Antigone," often characterized as one of literature's great killjoys, is downright inspiring.

Carson's translations, and she has done five of the Greeks to date, are freeing. They give you permission to love the work you're with. She breaks up long speechifying into electric dialogue. She cuts to the chase. She finds a way of showing the unsayable with an alarmingly poetic translation at just the right philosophical moment. In a patriarchal reverse when the son, Haimon, gives his Father the good ignored advice, the great translator Robert Fagles, gave us:
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"Oh Haimon, never lose your sense of judgment over a woman. The warmth, the rush of pleasure, it all goes cold in your arms..."

In Carson this becomes: "a fact of life I'll say to you now I'll say it one time/when you lay yourself under a pleasure female/the pleasure goes cold soon enough."

The phrase "pleasure female," much the way we say "cooking oil," is a linguistic and misogynist knife in the gut. It is one of many Carson moments that hung over the actors like word clouds, sticking in your ears as the play rolls on.

Of all the hard things to think about, it's hard to imagine that every era gets her Anne Carson. Who will do Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides such justice for audiences a hundred years from now? Do Carson's translations have a shelf life, or might they ring this true for decades to come? Wherever these answers blow, for now we have 27 more reasons to hope Carson might turn another ancient tragedy into Best New Play.

"Antigone" runs through Oct. 4 at BAM Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn, NY, 11217. For information or tickets, call 718-636-4100 or visit http://commerce.bam.org/tickets/production.aspx?pid=10311