ESeminar November 2007 - Topic 1

Young Antigone: An essay of auto-analysis
Martina Treu, IULM University , Milan , Italy

In July 2007 I spent some days in Venice with a group of students from my University (IULM). It was an extraordinary experience: we took part in the first International University Campus created by an important Italian Theatre director, Maurizio Scaparro, during the Venice Biennial Theatre Festival which he directed. A thousand students from all over the world were offered two weeks of shows, lessons, conferences and close encounters with theatre (see the report in www.dionys.org ). On the opening day, Scaparro greeted the students with these words: 'You, young people, are my main target as a director. I want you to love theatre, because I too have been young, once, and my school at that time made me hate theatre'.

I can easily compare his experience to mine in that: I shared his own feelings as a student, when theatre was not a common practice in Italian schools and universities. For years Scaparro and I, like many others, have been working hard to remedy the lack of theatre for young people. Now the trend is somehow changing, but slowly: theatre is still misjudged by too many colleagues as a frivolous spare-time activity compared to 'good studies' such as Latin and Greek Grammar. And yet, Scaparro reminds me, even the oldest and most venerable of us teachers must have been young, once. Perhaps we all should remember how we felt about theatre when we were young, what happened to us the first time we met theatre. Most probably we saw something, or met someone, that made us become either a theatre practitioner or a scholar or both, as happened to me.

As I work as a teacher in university and Dramaturg in theatre I keep asking myself: What in our life made us what we are? Maybe it was a teacher or person we met, or a particular text we loved and wanted to study (some of us actually never stop: for a great part of our lives seem almost obsessed with a text). Why do we 'feel' a classical drama and become interested in it? What do we want to tell about ourselves through a paper, a script, an artwork, a show or a film?

I put these questions to myself and to my colleagues some years ago, at a Classics Conference in Barcelona . In my paper I tried what I call – after Pierre Bourdieu – 'an experiment of autoanalysis'. I study my own case and I invite the reader to do the same. Personally, I found out that my career as an 'anti-classicist' at the Italian ' Classical School ' (Liceo Classico) had a turning point. A performance of Aristophanes' Clouds in Syracuse turned me, a rebel aged 17, into a theatre enthusiast and showed me the way: a narrow path between classicists and theatre practitioners. I chose Classics at the University and soon after I started working in theatre, while I was teaching Greek in high school (for some years) then Ancient Drama at the University in Venice, in Brescia and finally in IULM University (see Treu, 2005). Ever since, my work as a teacher and Dramaturg has constantly interacted with scholarly activity, influenced it, provided fresh ideas and suggestions. I would like to demonstrate this with a case I am actually working on.

All my classes deal with modern versions of Greek drama, stage and film productions. For the final examination each student has to write a sample of an original script based on an ancient drama. Some prefer to see a show and write a review about it. Most work, in both groups, focuses on one subject: Antigone. Over the years this has happened so often that I began to ask myself, why? One reason is self-evident: Antigone is one of the most popular ancient characters today (i.e. four different shows are on stage in Milan in the 2007/2008 season). But I suspect there are other reasons why my students and young people in general seem to like it better than other dramas.

There are indeed many themes and conflicts in Sophocles' drama that might be appealing for a modern audience. To synthesize, we can roughly distinguish an 'inner side' – what deals with inner thoughts, the identity of the individual, and the self-consciousness – and an 'outer side': the public law and will of others, the established social convention, what is commonly thought and accepted as a proper behaviour. These and other contrasts may be summarized as: Self / Society, Inner / Outer Law, City / Family, Power / Leadership, Male/ Female, Elder/Young. This last aspect, I shall call it 'young Antigone', is the one I found most interesting in my experience and underlies my current studies on reception.

Some years ago in Venice a girl student of mine wrote after my class an entire script: 'Antigone, la figlia di Edipo'. She then played the leading role and directed the production in several local Festivals. She wrote her degree thesis on that experience and successfully passed the final examination. Years later, in Brescia, another girl student wrote a drama about a male Antigone, whose two sisters have died fighting over a kingdom ('I had to create a fantasy world – she complained – because no real Country of any time, not even the United Kingdom, would fit such a story'). The students' scripts often remind me of Anouilh's Antigone . She is young and a rebel, above all. When I first read it I was very young and I identified with Antigone more than I ever did before, or after. Later on I saw Antigone on stage many times, perhaps more than any other classical show (the latest one, very impressive, was staged in August 2007 by ArchivioZeta at the breath-taking II World War German Cimitery in Futa Pass: see Treu, 2007 and the splendid photos on the website http://www.archiviozeta.eu/imma.html ).

At my age I do not identify with Antigone as I did at 14, of course. But I still find new reasons of interest each time I see her on stage or read her story in class, or outside it. So I am happy that my students love Young Antigone, but I want them to know more aspects and different faces of her, not just the young rebel they like so much. In my class I talk about Antigone as a symbol of struggle, justice, and rebellion against totalitarianism. We hear about her in theatres, in prisons (see e.g. The Island by Athol Fugard), wherever civil rights are banished and public power is perceived as oppressive, violent, or corrupt. Women who risk their lives to bury their brother, or oppose any evil regime, are compared to Antigone even if they do not know her name. Some Antigones are still alive, like Benazir Bhutto, back to Pakistan in October 2007 after a long exile: the death and funeral of her father and two brothers, many years ago, made her a symbol of struggle for democracy against the military regime. The ghost of Antigone may also be evoked when women die fighting for freedom and justice, like the German student Sophie Scholl, executed by Nazis with her brother Hans and the White Rose group in 1943 (about Antigone's presence in the German movie Sophie Scholl, die letzten Tage , 2005 see Maria Pia Pattoni's introduction in the forthcoming Italian edition of the Portuguese Antigona by Sérgio, 2008). Another 'Antigone of our days' can be considered the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaja, assassinated in October 2006, while reporting violations of civil rights and searching for truth about Chechnya.

Many women still die in the name of Antigone, in real life. In fiction too she is everywhere, on stage, in books and films: see e.g. the illustrated Antigone for young readers hand-published in India (Wolf, Rao & Roy, 2001) or the fiction trial in Italy (Valcarenghi, 2000). Online, she conquered the world wide web. As a recent study points out, in Google.com the name 'Antigone' occurs 152,000 times, in 34 different languages: 90,400 occurrences are in English, shared between many Countries; 649 sites are in Japanese, 356 in Chinese, 118 in Korean, 53 in Indonesian, 1390 in Swedish, 298 in Finnish, 4 in Arabic, 5 in Hebrew (Ripoli and Rubino, 2005: 156).

The study does not tell which sites are actually related to Sophocles and his character, and what kind of relationship it is. The online documents are too many, of course. When I began searching on the web for my study, in October 2006, I focused on young companies, in school and university, or theatres which have a young audience. As a first sample I chose the home made videos currently on http://www.youtube.com . Most videos listed under the reference 'Antigone' are filmed and acted by very young people. High school students read Sophocles' tragedy in class and stage it as homework. Some sing a rap, based on her story, while others mime or draw the essential plot. Some play a part of it, a scene or a dialogue.

Which ones? The choices are very significant: boys usually prefer the fight theme, the duel between Antigone's brothers, i.e. the antecedent of Sophocles's drama. Some play it in ironical or parodic version, with boys dressed as females. Girls' videos are usually different: they add and develop other aspects, like romantic love, brotherhood, rebellion. Among girls Antigone has more fans. She even has clones. Five young women years ago formed a rock band named 'Antigone rising' (for history, infos and photos see the official website: www.antigonerising.com ). They tell their story on a video, previously on YouTube ( Meet Antigone rising , part I). They read Sophocles' Antigone in a 'tragedy class' and were soon captured by this 'strong female figure': she is 'the first woman in Greece to fight the king', 'brilliant', 'a female rebel'.

This is what I call 'Young Antigone'. Her fans among young people are active through the web. I also can see this in other teachers' work: in October 2007 I located Antigone, as a favourite subject for children's theatre classes, in a 'teacher quick reference guide' on the web (http://childrenstheatre.org/pdfs/2007_antigone_ref.pdf). Among suggested activities are: to read a short version of the drama, analyze it, play it and organize a mock trial. I cite: 'In the character of Antigone, young people will find a worthy heroine unafraid to stand up for what she believes is right against all odds. Most enjoyed by children age 13+'. 'So young?' – I asked myself – 'but how old is Antigone?'

In Sophocles' Antigone she is in the very moment of life between puberty and marriage ( parthenos ). But how old would she be today and how can she appear, to a boy or girl of her same age? I had the luck to engage with this quandary in April 2007. After one year spent with Antigone in my University class, I took part in a conference held in Lovere (BG, Italy ), during a week of classical shows played by High School Students: the common theme, again, was Antigone. The audience age range was 13-17. I had the difficult task of ending the conference after some quite heavy scholarly papers. Students were clearly bored to death. I felt the need to awaken them, to let them see Antigone from another point of view: not an adult's or a teacher's but the closer to their world. I did not want them to feel any distance. I wanted them to care about Antigone by telling her story and showing her on stage and in films.

As I often do in my University classes, I began by asking the audience who is the main character, according to Greek standards, in Sophocles' Antigone . Surprise: it is the antagonistès Kreon , who is played by the first leading actor – the star of the show – the one who has actually the major role and is almost always on stage. But who wins the heart of audiences? They easily answer: Antigone. I told them how soon after the première she becomes an archetype . Probably after 442 bce . the audience missed Antigone: we can tell this by reading Phoenissae by Euripides (413 bce ) and Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus (467 bce ). A final scene including Antigone was added to both tragedies by someone who carefully imitated Sophocles. Many others will follow: before giving a few examples of her presence and metamorphosis I cite from George Steiner one simple question which is also ours: why is Antigone so popular till today? Why do we meet her everywhere, in Literature, Drama and Philosophy, and why does she influence so much our way of living and thinking ourselves? (Steiner, 1984).

I briefly tell them some historical and aesthetical reasons: Sophocles' drama was generally considered the best tragedy between the French Revolution (1789) and Freud ( 1905). For at least two centuries the daughter of Oedipus was more celebrated and loved than her father. Then the Freudian Oedipus Complex ruled. But between 1930 and the World War II Antigone rose again, and becomes definitively a symbol of rebellion, justice, freedom, as a reaction to the violence of military regimes, Nazi invasion and civil war. Free versions of the Sophoclean myth appeared in a short time in four European Countries: in Portugal , 1930 (Sérgio, 2008); in Catalonia , Spain , 1939 (Espriu, 1993); in France , 1942-1944 (Anouilh, 1946); in Germany , 1947 (Brecht, 2000).

Quite strangely, I notice, nothing similar happened in Italy . Nobody chose Antigone as a Myth of the Resistenza, the fight against Fascist and Nazi troops, although this quite soon gained the status of History and it was celebrated in epic and lyric tones among intellectuals. In Italy Antigone had to wait long after the war to become a symbol: the first moment of great revival was in the late Sixties, when Brecht's Antigone , played by Judith Malina and the Living Theatre (1967), had a European Tour and touched Italy too. This somehow opened a new era. I show the students a short scene from that performance and they are strongly impressed: they cannot believe the video is so old, and yet the show appears so young (their shock seems so great that I ask myself: what do they think about their parents, who are probably the same age as the show?)

I continue: in the Seventies Antigone became a symbol on both sides, and she was seen either as a rebel, or a terrorist, an outlaw or a believer in a superior justice. In 1977, for instance, terrorism struck Germany . Three terrorists died in jail. They apparently committed suicide, but most people want to know more. No German city received their bodies and allowed a public funeral. Some directors, including Fassbinder, joined together to write and direct a movie called ' Germany in Autumn' ( Deutschland im Herbst , 1977-1978). The movie itself was a free sequence of episodes. I show only one of them, written by Heinrich Böll and directed by Volker Schlöndorff: a group of TV managers in 1977 meet for a TV preview of Sophocles' Antigone , a classical performance simply filmed in theatre, without any allusion to the modern age. At the end of the preview they decide that it should not be broadcast: in such a hard times, Sophocles' words can easily be 'misunderstood' as an instigation to violence. In a dramatic climax, between fiction and reality, the movie ends with the funeral of the terrorists, finally permitted: they may rest, but not in peace (see Ripoli and Rubino, 2005: 68-71; 149-152).

In Italy too, since the Seventies, Antigone has often been associated with terrorism, law or justice: Antigone and the dead are symbols of a split country, on the verge of a civil war. This is explored in an Italian movie written and directed by Liliana Cavani, with a significant title: 'The Cannibals' ( I cannibali , 1971). At the conference I showed the beginning, where dead bodies lie all over in the streets of my city, Milan . The audience was deeply moved. Empathy with Antigone is still possible, due to her young innocence and great love for her brother. And yet she is an ambiguous figure, like many of the Seventies, and her myth now appears compromised by her mingling with terrorism and violence.

An echo of those violent times can be still heard today, but Antigone seems 'to study war no more', as told in the Spiritual Down by the riverside : she is now studying peace. I end my paper by remembering some Italian people who work for a better Country in the name of Antigone: an association which campaigns for civil rights and better condition in jail; a review, first published in 1985, deals with Philosophical and Social Matters; the theatre project 'Antigone delle città' born in 1991 in Bologna (a city hardly struck by terrorism), promotes public performances of classical and modern dramas for peace and against violence (see Ripoli and Rubino, 2005: 146-147; Tognolini, 1991; www.geocities.com/tognolini/Ant-sag1.html ).

After that conference in Lovere I kept working on the subject. I wrote this paper – my first (I hope not the last) on Antigone – just to show some examples and give a clue of what I have experienced. Antigone can be of course a symbol of different things, loved for different reasons at a different age even by the same people. I focused myself on what appeals greatly to our modern society and mostly among young people: the character I call 'Young Antigone' is alone, against her sister, her family, her world. She only has herself. She could follow Ismene's first choice, obey and live: she only has to give up her brother, her law, herself. She is loved, and she could choose to love. She chooses death. She has a boyfriend, but she does not marry him. They marry Death, one by one. They kill themselves, like Romeo and Juliet. Together they rest. But Antigone is not dead. She survived Sophocles and all the authors who dealt with her. She never grows old. Ever after.

Antigone died young, in 442 bce and many times ever since. Today she is more alive than ever. Sophocles made her immortal. Forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young,

Bob Dylan, Forever young (1973)

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Thanks to: Onelia Bardelli, Annalisa Di Liddo, Zachary Dunbar, Maria Pia Pattoni, Giovanni Nahmias

Works cited :

Anouilh J., 1946. Antigone , La table rond, Paris.

Bourdieu P., 2004. Esquisse pour une auto-analyse , Editions Raisons d'agir, Paris.

Brecht B., 2000. Antigone. In a Version by Bertolt Brecht (translated by Judith Malina), Applause Books, New York .

Espriu S., 1993. Antígona , edició crítica a cura de Carmina Jori i Carles Miralles, Barcelona.

Ripoli M. and Rubino M. (eds), 2005. Antigone. Il mito, il diritto, lo spettacolo , De Ferrari, Genova.

Sérgio A., 2008. Antigone , italian version by C. Cuccoro, introduction by M. P. Pattoni, Aracne Editrice, Roma (forthcoming).

Steiner G., 1984. Antigones. How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought , Clarendon Press, Oxford .

Tognolini B. (ed.), 1991. Antigone delle città , Bologna ( www.geocities.com/tognolini/Ant-sag1.html )

Treu M., 2005. Antico-classico = Anti-classico ? in Classicisme i anticlassicisme com a necessitats intel·lectuals , Ítaca , Quaderns Catalans de Cultura Clàssica, Societat Catalana d'Estudis Clàssics , N. 21, Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, pp.181-199 ( English abstract pp.279-280).

Treu M., 2007. 'Le montagne parlano greco', Hystrio. Trimestrale di teatro e spettacolo , XX, n. 4, p.102.

Valcarenghi, M., 2000. Signori della corte. Un'arringa per Antigone , Edizioni re Nudo, Colle val d'Elsa (SI).

Wolf G., Rao S. & Roy I. , 2001, Sophocles' Antigone , Tara Publishing, Chennai ( English Edition Copyright J.Paul Getty Museum , Los Angeles , CA ).

Martina Treu:

Webpage

English Language CV

Responses from Seminar Members:

Lorna Hardwick
The Open University

Many thanks Martina for this lively introduction to our new seminar series. You communicate very vividly the importance of theatre in attracting new people to the plays and in generating debate. In fact, I found your essay very suggestive about audiences in general and how spectators might be transformed, as well as about Antigone.

Your discussion raised two further questions for me. First, how best to develop awareness (both the self-awareness of the spectator and awareness of the richness of the plays). Initially, people may be attracted because of how they perceive the play as relating to current events or their own condition and of course this is an important aspect of theatre. However, I suppose that most people who know the plays well would point to how inexact the correspondences between ancient and modern figures and contexts actually are (and of course one of the reasons the plays have lasted is that interpretations are not ‘closed' or limited by time or place). So how can we try to do justice to the multi-layers of meaning in the plays and their transhistorical effects? How can the spectators (young and old) have their awareness transformed? Is there a special role for comparative study of how Antigone (for example) is regarded in different contexts and by different groups?

There is an interesting and provocative discussion of  the ‘relevance' factor in responses to classical material in Sally Humphreys, 2004 [2002], ‘Classics and Colonialism' in The Strangeness of Gods , Oxford, pp 8–50 at p.35, where she writes ‘ the discourse of relevance ignores the role of resistance and difficulty in the interpreter's love affair with texts: This resistance comes in varying combinations from the texts themselves, from accepted disciplinary paradigms, or from the allegorical heuristic reading through which she explores her own concerns by displacing them'. I find this suggested nexus between engagement and displacement very interesting and would be interested in hearing what you think

The second point I would like to raise is linked to this and also has a theoretical dimension. How can we best integrate the ‘personal voice' into our research? By ‘personal voice' I mean not only the response of the spectator (so important for work on how meaning is constructed and the impact of the point of reception, which includes the spectator alongside the director, designer and actors), but also the ‘personal voice' of the scholar – this might include impact on the framing of research questions.

Finally, on the point you raise about work with young people, there is work to be done on how Greek drama has been used in education and with youth and community groups - see for instance Alison Burke's study of the work of the TAG (Theatre Around Glasgow) initiative and the various initiatives of the Cyprus International Theatre Institute , led by Nicos Siafkalis.

Thanks again.

Lorna

[Burke, A. 2003. Characterising the Chorus: Individual and Collective in Four Recent Productions of Greek Tragedy . In The Role of Greek Drama and Poetry in Crossing and Redefining Cultural Boundaries . The Open University: Milton Keynes .

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Anthony Keen
The Open University

This is an interesting account of a personal reaction to Antigone. On one level, it's therefore impossible to criticize, as it is overtly subjective in its approach.

There are a few comments I'd like to make, though. None of them are particularly significant, but there are a few areas that could perhaps be expanded upon?

A lot of the evidence presented, certainly at the beginning of the paper, relates to receptions of Antigone within Italy . Whilst Antigone remains an important figure in all receptions of Greek drama, thanks to Sophocles and Anouilh, is she as important outside Italy as Martina Treu suggests she is in Italian receptions? How does she figure in the UK , for instance? I note that the UK is not amongst those nations highlighted as producing anti-Fascist Antigones.

Has Benazir Bhutto ever been described, or described herself, as an Antigone figure? How do the well-publicized accusations of corruption against her affect perception of her as Antigone? It has been suggested that she was slow to put herself in the firing line (currently still only metaphorically speaking) in the latest crisis. Is she Antigone, or Ismene in this context?

The figures for Google hits (certainly out of date by now) are impressive, but I'm not sure what they mean. It seems to me that their significance can't be assessed without knowing the equivalent figures for Medea, Clytemnestra, Hecuba, etc.

This is a strongly political reading of Antigone. Fair enough – that's certainly part of Sophocles' portrait of her. But another part of Sophocles' Antigone is surely the notion that the bonds of family are more important than any imposed by law. Could that be developed?

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George Theodiridis
http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/soloword/

Thank you very much, Martina for an interesting essay on Sophocles' 'Antigone'.

Your observation that there are two Antigones –the 'young' and the 'older' Antigone is, of course, absolutely valid and has been discussed by many writers, though, often focussing on two different perceptions of the character.

In this play, the peculiar, bewildering yet exciting thing, the thing unique to Sophocles and to this play in particular is the mutation of the central theme from that of 'Laws of the Gods versus the Laws of the Mortals' to that of 'the Lone Individual versus the State with all its protective apparatus'. This adversarial stance, of course, as many other adversarial stances in literature, has been adopted by people who wish to stand against, to subvert an established order, however that established order may manifest itself: from religious thrones to the thrones of State politics and to the chairs in the corporate board rooms; and you quite rightly point out a number of such people.

To such people, Sophocles' young woman, Antigone, has often become a paradigm, an emblem, a canvas upon which they draw their own image.

The play fascinated me enormously ever since I first came across it and because, thankfully, unlike you and director Maurizio Scaparro, of the excellent teachers at my University lecture theatres and tutorial rooms. And I too, saw at the time, the girl Antigone as a very young tragic character, much like Juliet, Iphigeneia, Elektra, Polyxene (Hecabe's daughter) -Lysistrata, even- and many other young women in literature who stood up against, or pleaded against the orders and commands of powerful men. And I, too, had focussed for many years on the strength of the character and the power of the ideas and actions of these young women and had thought that this was the core of Sophocles' play, 'Antigone'.

But ancient Sophocles 'plays' with us, moderns, in a way. Or at least, often we don't fully understand what it is he was doing back then, what he has done in this play. We are too engrossed in what he has done with this character as well as all his other characters and so we miss out on what he has done with the message, the 'didagma' of the work. Perhaps my 'we' is a little too presumptuous. At the very least, I, now feel that Sophocles is telling us something else and the evidence of this is his final scene.

Although, as your students have pointed out, the girl Antigone plays but a short role in the eponymous play, Sophocles gives her an astonishing wealth of personality characteristics which magnitizes our interest and empathy. We are drawn into her life so as to see where her ideas and actions will take her –and us. Is Sophocles' lesson in those ideas and actions, we ask ourselves? And so we will follow that life until… well, shockingly, no further than her death –or a report about her death, at line 1115.

Yet, the play goes on for another two hundred lines at least! Lines which may well make us feel distressed because we no longer hear – at this very important part of the play, the part where the French Lit. Crits would call the 'dénouement' and where all things 'end,' one way or another, about the character that interested us most throughout the play! We are distressed because we want some sort of clean dénouement, some sort of catharsis. We want our grief for her loss to be noted, acknowledged and commented upon by one or more of the other characters. Shakespeare would certainly have given us that satisfaction. So would a great many other writers, of the same era and ever since.

Yet these final couple of hundred lines are some of the most important lines of the play. In this final scene, Sophocles completely abandons Antigone, leaves behind her ideas, her actions and her story and, instead, brings into centre stage Creon, a King, who grieves deeply for the loss of other people and of all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with the young 'parthena'. He grieves for the death of his wife and the death of his son –Haemon, Antigone's could-have-been lover- and we are also told to leave behind our emotions about Antigone and begin to feel for a grieving King! Would the 5 th Century audience also feel distressed at this shifting of their attention and empathy? I am not certain but I suspect not.

The play ends not with the death of a girl but with the calamity that has befallen upon a house, the house of Creon. The end reminds us of the beginning which also discusses the destruction of a house, another blood line, the blood line of another King, the blood line of Antigone's own father, Oedippus. The play, therefore, is not so much about the death of a single human being, nor even about the youthful vitality or the strength of her conviction, or the peril of her ideas, nor the immense and corruptive power of a king nor the qualities of any other human being; it is a play that shows the destruction of two houses, two blood lines. And if we ask the two questions, 'Why? Why have those houses been destroyed?' and 'Why has Sophocles decided to tell us about these two houses?' we would need to hear again the words of the Herald (ll 1156 ff):

I shall never praise nor lament the life of

Man, whatever it may be.

Fate lifts him high and Fate drops him

Hard upon his destruction whether he lives well or

Miserably.

And no one can tell what's in store for him

My translations, see www.users.bigpond.net.au/soloword/

And again, later, at ll 1338-9 the words of the chorus when it admonishes Creon with,

Ask of nothing for now. 

Man is not able to escape the disaster wrought by his Fate.

The abandonment of the young Theban Princess is deliberate. It tells us that, in the larger scheme of things, ideas and actions of people, common folk, kings, priests or peasants are much lower in importance than the will of Fate. Sophocles might have been a conservative and deeply religious person but, more importantly, unlike his older colleague, Aeschylus and his younger one, Euripides, he was a fatalist. To him, Fate existed, Fate declared and Fate ruled the beginning, the middle and the end of our performance on the stage of life; and were you to be given the opportunity to ask him the question you've asked yourself, 'what in our life made us what we are?' his answer would be Fate.

So yes, you're quite right to visualise two Antigones as two different characters all rolled up into one human being but there are also two plays called 'Antigone' all rolled up in the one work.

And though we might not agree with them we can excuse philosophers like Hegel and others who thought this to be the greatest dramatic work ever.

Once again, thank you for contributing to this forum and for telling us about your experiences with this play.

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Final Response from Martina Treu
Email: martinatreu@libero.it

I'd like to thank you all, indeed, for your responses and comments, for the suggestions you gave me and the interesting questions you raise. They will certainly help me to improve and expand my research in the next phase. Actually, in the short time I had to write my paper, I had to concentrate on some aspects of it, to stress just a few points, and leave behind many others. That is one reason why I started writing about what I thought I knew best, in my experience, about Italy and about my work. Now, as you may well understand, the more I think about it the more I feel there is a huge amount of work to do.

As you pointed out, I am far from exploring the infinite possibilities that lie in Sophocle's text. It is true I did not talk much about Sophocles' Antigone , rather about what I should call “her Myth and Legend” after Steiner: I chose Antigone as paradigm, as he did, because it has some special qualities and moreover is specially attractive to a young audience; but at the same time this character showed me the way for a comparative study that can be on expanded to different objects and developed in many directions: how do our perceptions and consciousness of theatre and of ourselves shift and change in time? How the same drama, character or subject can be seen in different ages and by different groups?

The “awareness”, as Lorna Hardwick suggested, is in fact the key and the very starting point of my research. Our inquiry on ancient theatre is always personal and starts from ourselves. It is inevitable. And yet we must not forget the distance between us and our objects and indeed the differences in the peculiar nature of each text and performance. The concept of ‘relevance' is really interesting. I have not yet read the paper she mentions, unfortunately, but I certainly will. At present I can give this answer: Personally I am, and I feel I will always be, in an instable balance between engagement and displacement, distance and proximity with ancient text. That is the core of my work and research: a neverending quest for a dynamic relationship between past and present, as an individual, as a teacher and as a theatre practitioner.

The distance between ancient Greeks and us is immense, and discouraging. But at the same time the attraction encourages us to continue. If I carry on studying, reading and staging texts it is only because I hear ‘good vibrations' in the ancient text, something which combines together with other parts of myself and ‘sounds'. That should not mean, however, that I can force texts until they say what we want to hear. As a scholar and teacher I am supposed to be objective. I should try to be. But I should not forget that no matter how hard I try, I am somehow influenced by a number of factors. I know that my students influence me as the audience does in theatre, or as readers you all do in this Eseminar.

I did not mention it in my paper, but the first part of my class is always dedicated to the analysis of texts, context, historical conditions. I give my students an approximate idea of translation, without hiding from them the complexity of texts. I do not give my opinion while we read a text, I rather report and discuss as many different interpretations as possible, but nonetheless I warn my students to be always aware of who we are, what has brought us where we are, how our education and life experiences are constantly changing us.

In myself, the ‘objective' approach I must have in university, as a scholar and teacher, lives together with the subjective one which I can express in theatre. As a playwriter or spectator, director or actor, I am not compelled to be objective in any way: I am free to choose any interpretation I like. I can write whatever I feel. I bring my life into my character. I can be Antigone or Kreon and myself.... Dr. J. or Mr. H.?

I absolutely agree with Antony Keen that my research should be expanded and I believe it could be greatly improved by his suggestions. It is true that my point of view is essentially personal, and Italian, for the reasons I mentioned before. Honestly, I cannot answer about UK , at the moment, because I have not yet studied or seen any performance of a British Antigone . Nor I was able to go, unfortunately, to the 2006 conference in Dublin where the theme was developed: but I will try to fill the gap and read at least the proceedings – if they will be published – and investigate further on the subject.

Another area Dr. Keen suggested for a further inquiry, with caution and awareness, is the Internet. As a starting point I chose to concentrate on young groups and students, but I need more time to explore other sites. I will search more widely because, of course, the numbers alone are not significant. So, even if the name of Antigone is mentioned so many times, this does not mean so much in itself. It certainly would be interesting a comparative study between the frequency of Antigone's name and those of other ancient characters, Medea or Elektra.

As for the family bonds I did not have time to talk about it, in my paper, but I agree that the essence of tragedy, if there ever was one, lies there. That is why the case of Benazir, the heir of Bhutto Family, is to me the most interesting among many “Antigones of our times”. I am still looking for more information and checking details, but as far as I know she was actually compared to Antigone by several western newspapers according to Rubino (2005, 245), because her story combined the curse of a family and the burial of a brother. She lost her father and both male brothers in tragic circumstances, and apparently she was prohibited to take part in the family public funerals that could be the beginning of a riot, or this was what the regime feared. After the death of her male relatives she appeared to be the only one who could carry on the name and fame of Bhutto family, even if she is a woman and she actually has a sister who apparently had no public life, as no one ever talks about her, while Benazir became the First Lady of Pakistan.

After her rise and fall, in recent years, she is even more interesting for the suggested matter of inquiry: the perception of her behaviour, particularly in our western world, where she spent her years of exile. In a way I suspect the Western culture wanted her to be ‘one of us'. For us she was in a way a connection between West and East: if not a “tamed beast” in a zoo, at least someone who gives us a chance – or maybe the illusion– of coming a little closer to know and understand better that exotic, mysterious and frightening world. To the Eastern world she remained somehow tied for all these years: for her fans, in Pakistan, she continued to be a symbol; on her arrival a bomb exploded and many people died trying to greet her; the regime itself still somehow needs her, as she was offered a deal to come back, then ‘protected' against terrorism, then locked in her house as a prisoner...

I believe that Antigone has escaped her prison, but she also set herself free from her creator and she might also deceive her fans with her many faces and disguises. She is no longer confined in texts or tied to the core of Sophocle's myth. Her name can be given to any kind of resistance. Her identity is constantly shifting. She is not necessarily young, nor old. She can be guilty or innocent, or ambiguous as she was in the Seventies. She may be stubborn, or selfish, violent or corrupt.

Benazir herself may be changed from Antigone (if she ever was) to an Ismene. Or she is a mixture of both, or neither. Who could know it after so many years, and from here, in Europe ? I fear that the lack of information and the distance are too big, to formulate any hypothesis. I cannot tell if she is really corrupt, if she is “on the fire line” now or she ever was. Recently I heard she was again under arrest, in her house. The ‘official' reason is apparently to protect her, or prevent a peaceful demonstration. The same situation recurrs, apparently, and yet many things must have changed in years. She most likely has accepted some compromises, otherwise she would not have come back home. And she is still alive. But in the end what is it that really counts in her story, herself, her family, her Country? Again I personally cannot tell, so huge is the distance in time and space. For the same reason it is even more difficult for me to imagine how the ancient Antigone appeared to her author, and to her audience..

That is why I appreciate what George Theodiridis writes about himself and his individual history, how he changed his views on Antigone , in different moments of life. I understand well what he means with his words: “I, now, feel that…”. I am not so sure about what he means by saying “We” and “What Sophocles is telling us ”. When I read and discuss the text of Antigone with students, colleagues or other people, very seldom two of us feel or think the same. That is why I try not to use the collective “we” or “us”: I feel not at ease talking in the name of someone else. And if I cannot decide what ‘we' means, honestly, I am still more and more puzzled about what Sophocles thought and about what he wanted to tell his audience.

If I may answer frankly to George Theodiridis I confess I do not feel the same kind of sympatheia with Sophocles, for a variety of reason, including his age: not only did he live 25 centuries ago, he was Greek and male. Moreover he never met a “young Sophocles”. Antigone is one of the earliest surviving tragedies we have, and yet it he was a mature man when he wrote it. Actually, the three major tragic poets wrote the texts we have at the age of 50 or more. I do not know if someone ever wrote on that. However, Aristophanes was probably half their age when he wrote Acharnians , his first surviving comedy: and if I can add a personal comment (one more!) I cannot help asking myself if this has something to do with my personal s ympatheia with him, which began when I was 17 and never declined (it is by far the longest love affair of my life!). Maybe it was also because I perceived him as ‘young' that I felt much closer to him than to the tragic writers and therefore chose to start my career from his first comedies when I was young? I am just joking, but dealing with Aristophanes one could not be too serious, and yet one never knows: everything is possible...

However it may seems, and no matter how we are and ‘feel' about one author or another, in conclusion, I still believe that ancient texts are talking to us, and we can try to understand something of what they say if we listen carefully. For instance we can find a clue about the audience expectations by reading the final part of Seven against Thebes and Phoenissae , most likely added later under the influence of Sophocles. As for the final part of Antigone I suspect the ancient audience should not be surprised by her relatively early disappearance, as George Theodiridis points out: according to Greek standards, as I said, it is Kreon the protagonistès , he is the one entitled to end the tragedy. But it is nonetheless true that probably, in the ancient view, Sophocle's text was not intended as Kreon's nor as Antigone's tragedy. It is the final part of a larger story, a family affair which involves a whole city: a collective, not an individual matter.

Tragedy is essentially the expression of a collective thought. If the individuals stand alone, and think about themselves, they fail. Whilst it is true, as any chorus could say, that “together we stand” or fall. About the Chorus, which has been since many years the main object of my research, I wish to thank once again Lorna Hardwick for her suggestion and references of great interest. I wish I could have more time to talk about this subject, but I can at least mention an article of mine “ Coro per voce sola” (forthcoming 2008), soon to appear in the next issue of Dioniso , the annual review of Syracuse ' Greek Drama Institute ( http://www.indafondazione.org/dioniso/ ).

In that paper I start from Claude Calame's studies on ancient choral lyric and drama and particularly the notion of collective identity'. As anyone knows, the chorus is a distinctive feature of Greek Drama that has lost importance and almost disappeared in the modern history of European theatre. Therefore it is now a well-know problem for playwrights and directors. Most of them avoid it or suffer it when adapting an ancient text or bringing it on stage. Some of them prefer to cut or to reduce choral parts. But the chorus, and what I call “the emotion of a multitude”, can also be a great resource for a reprise of Greek Drama. Some recent productions are cited as good examples in my paper. Here I can only mention one of them; the Persians directed by Claudia Bosse and performed in 2006 at the Grütli Theatre, Geneva (see photos and documents, in French , at www.grutli.ch/lesperses ) . Its huge chorus of 170 citizens, originally meant as 500, aimed to recreate the mass participation in Festivals and in the democratic institutions of ancient Athens , and it finally turned out to be an outstanding experience both for the chorus members and the audience.

However, the chorus is always a big challenge, maybe the greatest one, for a director nowadays. Some think it is impossible to put it on stage again, some others endure the task, at least as much as possible. They gather a number of people who are often young, sometimes they are pupils of a theatre school, who are the least expensive choice for a production (as I wrote in my paper), compared to adults, but are also more energetic, enthusiastic and more willing to become a group with a hard training. Sometimes the result is worth the effort, we see on stage a chorus in a modern sense, but also something that remind us the ancient one. No matter how huge and discouraging the distance may be, we can hear the echoes of a collective voice. When it happens, seldom, it is a miracle, to me.

I have come to the end of this paper, but my research is at the very beginning. I had to set a starting point, and I feel like driving with a GPS satellite system. I began searching where I am now, where I am leaving from. Then I set the arrival point, and I have an idea of the distance between me and my object. Last, but not least, I should find the road and try to get there. How? Which is the fastest and easiest road? Could we get there at all? I have maps, signs and so on, of course, but no satellite or computer could give me the right answer. Maybe there is no road to get to Antigone. Or there are many, as many as we are. There are certainly more than two Antigone in Sophocles'text, and many more in those that follows: as many as we readers and scholars and spectators are, as many as each of us in different ages read her words or sees her on stage.

Thank you again for your responses, I hope my reply does not deceive you. I will do my best to follow the paths you traced as far as I can.