THE RIOT ACT. To 11 October.
London
THE RIOT ACT
by Tom Paulin
Gate Theatre To 11 October 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm also Sunday 28 September 6pm
Runs 1hr 5min No interval
TICKETS: 020 7229 0706
boxoffice@gatetheatre.freeserve.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 22 September 2003
Clear, forceful updating of Sophocles in an intense production.Antigone is a play suited to Northern Ireland, if only because it's about people who won't compromise. Both the young woman who symbolically buries her disgraced dead brother's body and her uncle, who's posthumously outlawed one brother and elevated the other's memory, to prevent civil strife, are sure they're right. It's not only that they never find a chance to resolve the matter. The concept of compromise is in neither's nature.
That's clear from Katherine Parkinson's quiet opening discussion with her more level-headed sister Ismene in Tom Paulin's rewrite. It explodes into forceful clarity as the people enter to be faced by Christopher Hunter's dominating Creon. This is a magnificent performance of a ruler who is unmoveable because he never reflects he may be wrong. This civic leader may come from a democratic setting but he's as much the autocratic boss as any ancient king.
Hunter's Creon faces people down, whether staring at, or looking past, them. Face or voice may catch an apparent glance of humour but it's not actual. Cadences of reason hold dictatorial commands; you're told what to think, and it's not for argument.
Yet Creon's command crumbles, Hunter's dress and walk losing their initial formal control as death snakes all round him (never excessively - a loosened sleeve, a swaying step). Antigone, his son Haemon, wife Eurydice, all take their lives owing to his command. Violence implodes through his world.
And simultaneously through society. It's a good economy that the citizens' Chorus is composed of the actors not currently required for individual characters. It also gives added intensity as when David Rolston, one moment a choric citizen, reverts to being the dead Haemon, collapsing before his father. Or when Carole Nimmons' black-covered Eurydice, silhouetted against the white palace removes her head-shroud the speak the final comment.
Louis Price uses the Gate's tiny space imaginatively, setting the audience on a fragment of a Greek amphitheatre and providing a long, red-striped walkway for grand Creon entries from a mesh-protected headquarters. Alan Cox's production, uniformly well acted, gives the ancient tragedy new resonance along with a local habitation and a new name.
Guard: Gareth Glen
Creon: Christopher Hunter
Tiresias: John Kane
Messenger: J D Kelleher
Eurydice: Carole Nimmons
Ismene: Elizabeth Ann O'Brien
Antigone: Katherine Parkinson
Haemon: David Rolston
Director: Alan Cox
Designer: Louis Price
Lighting: Andy Phillips
Sound: Fergus O'Hare
2003-09-23 16:42:48