By Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
ANTIGONE ★½
Emily Milledge's Antigone is raw, naked and quivering for death.Credit: Pia Johnson
Sophocles, adapted by Jane Montgomery Griffiths
Malthouse Theatre, until September 13
Aaron Orzech and Jane Montgomery Griffiths in Antigone.Credit: Pia Johnson
The few productions of Greek tragedy seen in Melbourne over the past decade were all, despite their faults, more faithful to the original than this turgid adaptation of Antigone, which disturbs and unbalances Sophocles' dramaturgy in pursuit of political relevance.
It's surprising that Jane Montgomery Griffiths a classics scholar and actor of enviable technique, should have devised a script as reductive as this one.
Sophocles' Antigone compresses its argumentation with absolute dramatic clarity. The central conflict is wounding, direct yet subtle; the two opposing virtues Creon and Antigone embody – the interest of the state in maintaining social order, and the need to honour the dead – must be evenly matched for the play to work.
That isn't true of this adaptation. The role of Creon, gender-reversed into a power-suited, Julie Bishop-style "Leader" (played by Griffiths), is expanded and eviscerated at once. When Emily Milledge's Antigone – raw, naked and quivering for death – accuses her aunt of empty rhetoric, you absolutely believe her, because that is what Griffiths has put into the Leader's mouth. Slogans, excuses, weasel words.
Gone is the Leader's belated change of heart, the suicide of her spouse. The tragedy lies in a woman who completely evacuates her humanity to support the overreaching, malign power of the State.
Adina Jacobs does have an eye for visual theatre. Striking imagery abounds: the use of Abu Ghraib-like poses of torture, a mutilated Antigone inhabiting the role of the blind seer Tiresias, a sequence where the Styx itself flows across the stage.
But these, like the lurid imagery of death and decomposition in the script, can be more decorative than dramatic.
There's much needless disimprovement on Sophocles: Josh Price giving the "greatness of man" chorus as an enthusiastic torturer; the unhinged ranting Aaron Orzech spouts in lieu of Haemon's tight arguments from filial love; even placing the otherwise memorably intense stoush between Ismene (Elizabeth Nabben) and Antigone second to the Leader's soundbites.