I pretty much went into the Olivier Theatre with no idea what the play was about.  Luckily, a fairly friendly man sat next to me and pointed out the Oedipus family tree in the programme, which reminded me that I’d already seen Oedipus at the NT when Ralph Fiennes took the title role (my verdict on that boiled down to “it was good, but really really grim). We speculated a bit on what kind of era the play seemed to be set in – I went with early 80s, he went with 50s until I pointed out the printer/fax machine/whatever. Might have been 70s with all the beige and brown in the set.

Other thoughts:

1. Play called “Antigone”, but Antigone isn’t really there most of the time. Probably a catchier name than “Creon” though.
2. The Soldier = very attractive (yep, I’m shallow).
3. I did like the about-turn from Ismene – she might not have been willing to actually go against the state, but she stuck with her sister when push came to shove.
4. The whole duty to your family versus duty to the state was interesting. Even more interesting when I remembered about this being written back in the day with the whole ancient Greece thing going on and the role of women being entirely different back then.
5. Which did make Ismene being unwilling to bury her brother at the beginning make more sense. She’s not supposed to really have a mind of her own, and Antigone’s disobedience of the state (and also her own Uncle) is that bit more shocking/unusual.
6. Creon was a bit of an arse after the initial bit where he seemed fairly reasonable, wasn’t he? Admittedly, that’s not a technical term…
7. Poor Eurydice. She’s there for all of five minutes and then she’s dead.
8. Christopher Eccleston was nicely politician-y as Creon.
9. I think the comments on gender and the roles of men and women were what caught my attention most while watching (and probably raised the few giggles that the tragedy does have). Possibly because most of my thoughts are on my presentation/essay about women and fundamentalism that I’ve got to do.
10. Actually, when they were talking about Creon’s son, Haemon, being betrothed to one of the sisters, I thought they were talking about him being engaged to Ismene rather than Antigone. Which made me confused later on. Ismene gets forgotten about after being taken away pretty much. I wanted to know what happened to her.

It was very satisfying to watch.  Glad I knew it was a tragedy, at least, before watching because, with that knowledge, you can see exactly what’s going to drop on Creon when Haemon comes to talk to him.

Not entirely sure what the point of the slowing down of time/slow motion bits were. It was interesting to see, but… yeah.  I’d probably have to think about that more than I have brain-space for.

Originally published at half girl, half robot. You can comment here or there.

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