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In the Centre for Performance Studies' 1993 'Greek Tragedy in Translation' workshop the director's and actors' brief was to explore three versions of the same scenes from Sophocles' Antigone, the first stasimon or choral passage (382-83) and the following scene of the watchman's return with .Antigone, containing his account of how she was caught burying her brother Polynices' corpse and her defence of this act to Creon (384-525). The three versions were those of Lewis Campbell (1873) and Elizabeth Wyckoff (1954), and Judith Malina's 1966 translation of Brecht's 1948 version of Hölderlin (1804).
To characterize briefly the resulting three 'performances': the Lewis Camp-bell version was done as a simple confrontation in Shakespearean-Elizabethan style between a regal but benevolent Creon and an innocent .Antigone; the Malina version of Brecht aimed to follow Brechtian principles of distance from the role, and of acting to the audience. Similarly, decisions about how to stage the Wyckoff version, the least immediately suggestive, were prompted by the language of the translation. Once its style was recognised as being very like that of the 50s verse drama contemporary with it (e.g. that of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry), a period setting seemed appropriate. This being the era of the cold war, the context the director chose was that of political repression behind the iron curtain. So the confrontation between Creon and Antigone was put inside an interrogation room. With the invisible fourth wall separating actors and audience and the chorus located 'out of sight' on the street outside, the scene became an essentially private one.
The more this setting's implications were worked out in the relationships between the characters, a vulnerable and defeated .Antigone, and a Creon with no external constraints to his power, and, we suspect, very few personal restraints to his cruelty, the more I felt something had been lost. It is hard to define exactly what this was, as the interpretation still suggested wider ethical and political resonances. The working out of the scene was consistent, imaginative and sensitive. Perhaps my unease is to be explained by the fact that .Antigone had already lost and was doomed, so that Creon had no reason to be swayed by what she said. He could ignore it because there...