ANTIGONE. To 29 November.
Tour
ANTIGONE
by Sophocles new version by Blake Morrison
Northern Broadsides on tour to 29 November 2003
Runs 1hr 30min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 October at Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds
Free version gives full power to Sophocles' tragedy.Greek tragic Choruses come in various sizes these days, from studio solo-turns to masked arrays in vast arenas. But Northern Broadsides' 7-strong team of townsfolk for this play is peculiarly fitting. Seven gates of post-Oedipus Thebes have been the foci for battle between two brothers. In unity's interest, power-assuming Creon has honoured one dead brother, declared the other a traitor whose corpse must lie unburied.
When his niece Antigone symbolically earths-over her disgraced brother, Barrie Rutter's Creon sharply angry but curiously hard to pin-down at times, his anger seeming to float into the air rather than directly at other people rages with pomp and certainty at the start. Here's a practical man untroubled by others' viewpoints, authoritative in his suit and tie.
By the end he's devastated, in shirt-sleeves, tie at low-mast, the booming ruler who patrolled the stage sinks, groping for support from the two carts bearing his dead wife and son.
This Antigone's a devastating experience, thanks largely to Blake Morrison's free adaptation. To the seven gates he adds an eighth, metaphorical one Death. Not above a bit of shock-and-awe modernity, the script's vivid and pointed. At his confident eight Creon throws every family insult he can at Antigone. Rutter casts them like syllabic slabs culminating in the shock obscenity about Oedipus- Your slag of a mum, your murdering brother, your motherfucking dad'.
Slightly built, dirty-faced from her work, Sally Carman's Antigone is no genteel heroine. She's a neighbour you'd not want to quarrel with. Both she and Creon have much to offer the world; head to head in collision (eyeball to eyeball here) they're mutually destructive. Yet the other women barely count; sister Ismene and wife Eurydice are kept shadowy in the action.
Broken-down industry in the immediate aftermath or far links Giuseppe Belli and Emma Barrington-Binns' set to a despoiled English industrial wasteland.
When required for another role, members of the seated chorus they might be relishing a round in the local pub peel off. They don't return, suggesting a community newly devastated by the unexpected conflict that has an impact far wider than the immediate protagonists.
Chorus/Guard: Conrad Nelson
Chorus/Tyresias: Andrew Vincent
Chorus/Haemon: Jonathan Le Billon
Chorus: Andrew Whitehead, Dennis Conlon, David Bowen, Jason Furnival
Antigone: Sally Carman
Ismene: Sara Poyzer
Creon: Barrie Rutter
Eurydice: Jacqueline Redgewell
Director: Barrie Rutter
Designers: Giuseppe Belli, Emma Barrington-Binns
Composer: Conrad Nelson
2003-10-23 10:21:57