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University of British Columbia
Frederic Wood Theatre
presents
ANTIGONE
By
Jean Anouilh
Directed By
Brenda Leadlay
October 11-15
1988
The Frederic Wood Theatre Magazine
A Seasonal Publication of University Productions Inc.
For further information regarding this
and upcoming publications call:
(604) 732-7708 J*-
I
Anouilh on Anouilh
I have now occupied myself for some time with the theatre and with such
success that I appear to have attracted an uncomfortable amount of attention.
Some have explained this by saying that I am a skillful technician of the well-
made play. I take this as a compliment, for my father was a tailor's cutter, a
simple and honorable man who was an expert at his work and took great pride in
it. I have always wished that I would be as good a handicraftsman as my father if
the practice of literature should escape me.
We are in the process of eliminating the concept of the "well-made play"
now that it has reigned supreme in the theatre until it has become mummified.
Pirandello decided one day to eliminate it with a stroke of genius: Six Characters
in Search of an Author. But despite this summary execution, despite everything
that we can do, each in accordance with his ability, despite all this acuteness and
patience - where are we? We look like the eternal pupils who have to take their
exams once again.
A play must be written and played better than real life. Life can be very nice,
-but it has no form. Art does nothing but give it this form and make it by all
means at its disposal truer than reality.
V
Drama does not offer solutions. Drama cannot offer solutions. But it should
train us to see the complexities of this world, the immeasurable shading of every
argument, the wholeness of conflicting issues, and thus the truth.
Conflict - the clash of wills, the clash of temperaments, the clash of people -
has always been an integral part of world drama. Conflict - either subtly
disguised or openly visible - is at the very centre of all of my plays. Jean Anouilh:
A Brief Chronology
1910
Jean Anouilh is bom on June 23, near Bordeaux.
1918-29
Anouilh's primary and secondary education is in Paris; he studies law briefly at
the Universite de Paris.
1929-31
Anouilh works as a copy writer for an advertising agency, and also as a "gag"
writer for the movies.
1931-32
Works as secretary to Louis Jouvet at the Com6die des Champs Elysees.
1932
Anouilh writes Jezabel, which is not performed. L'hermine is staged at the
Theatre de l'Qiuvre. Decides to devote himself exclusively to the theatre.
1935
Y avait unprisonnier is staged at the Theatre des Ambassadeurs, March 21; film
rights are sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
1942
Eurydice is staged at the Theatre de l'Atelier, December 18, directed by Andr6
Barsacq.
1944
Antigone is staged at the Theatre de l'Atelier, February 4, directed by Andre
Barsacq.
1951
Colombe is staged at the Theatre de l'Atelier, February 11, directed by Andre
Barsacq.
1952
Publishes Trois comedies de Shakespeare (adaptations of As You Like It,
Twelfth Night, and The Winter's Tale).
1953
Anouilh adapts, with Paule de Beaumont, Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the
Elms, which is staged at the Comedie des Champs Elysees, November 5.
1954
Adapts, with Claude Vincent, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest,
which is staged at the Comedie des Champs Elysees, October 29.
1959
Becket: ou, L'honneur de Dieu is staged at the Theatre Montparnasse, October 8,
directed by Jean Anouilh.
1962
Anouilh adapts, with Nicole Anouilh, Graham Greene's The Complacent Lover.
1964
Adapts William Shakespeare's Richard HI, which is staged at the Theatre
Montparnasse.
1971
Becket enters the repertory of the Comedie Frangaise.
1987
Dies in Paris. Interpreting Antigone
Paris under Nazi occupation - February, 1944: a bitter winter, power
failures, freezing theatres, and air-raid sirens. But the Parisians flocked to the
Atelier, drawn by the figure of Anouilh's Antigone and her example of strenuous
resistance against the cruel authority of the Occupation. In her cry of "No!" they
heard the voice of their own refusal to capitulate to inhuman subjection; and in
her determination to die rather than submit they saw an image of the Resistance
fighter's morality of refusal.
How could the Nazi censor have licensed such subversion? His interpretation
of Anouilh's play, we can only infer, must have located its primary significance
in the bleak political experience of Creon, the King. Predisposed to grant Creon
the force of his arguments, the censor would have heard a voice lamenting the
hardships of government, persuading the audience of the need to do one's work in
a conscientious way, to say "Yes!" to the difficult demands of life. The man is
no tyrant, no villain in a melodrama. He leaves the tragedy a softened and almost
sympathetic figure, holding the hand of a small child and facing up to his
responsibilities.
It seemed, after the liberation, that these radically different interpretations of
Antigone had been shaped by the political pressure of the time. Instead of a call
to resistance the Parisian theatre-goers now heard a rejection not of Nazi
oppression but of existence itself - a cry of "No!" against all happiness, and a
vehement dismissal of life's many satisfactions as cowardly forms of
compromise. In the United States (where the right to the pursuit of happiness is
a self-evident truth) Anouilh's play suddenly becomes unsuitable for performance
and Katherine Cornell, the actress who had purchased the rights, found herself
having to play a heroine whose death was simply incomprehensible. Lewis
Galantiere was commissioned to "adapt" his translation, and the result is a
peculiarly American interpretation of Antigone: an heroic assertion of freedom
against tyranny, of the primacy of moral law and the sanctity of human dignity.
Sophocles would have been delighted. But this is not Anouilh's play.
Interpreting Antigone would seem to depend upon a range of factors: the
political climate of the time, one's personal tendency to favor one or other side
of the argument, the infinite possibilities of the Antigone myth itself. Few
plays have been so compulsively mined as a source for later dramatists, and each
new version of the myth in itself constitutes a new interpretation of Sophocles'
original play. Brecht's version sees her as a failed political anarchist who strikes
before the iron is hot. The Living Theatre turned Antigone into an anti-Vietnam
War protest. In Athol Fugard's South African restatement of the tale, two black
political prisoners enact a self-defeating myth of love in the confines of Robben
Island. Broadway has just seen Gurney's Another Antigone... The list is endless.
George Steiner has written a book on the hundreds of Antigones which have
reinterpreted the story of the girl who buries her brother in defiance of the state.
But there are two traditional interpretations of Sophocles' play which have
shaped the way in which we read the myth, and which have permeated the
modern consciousness as decisively as Freud's reading of the Oedipus. Both
derive from the early Nineteenth Century, and exist in extraordinary contradiction
of each other. The first of these is Hegel's. The play, for him, is a model of
dialectical progression - an image of the mind's evolving processes and the
forward movement of human history. We advance through creative conflict,
through the collision of equally balanced forces of moral right: the human Right
of Antigone to bury her brother against the right of the State to overrule
individual motive in the interests of the community. Both Antigone and Creon
are ethically impelled, and both are equally convincing - even though their
arguments cancel each other out and end in destruction and self-defeat. This,
surely, is how the Nazi censor must have read the play: through Hegelian
spectacles which viewed Creon's position without prejudice and which foresaw a
long-range optimism in the denouement - a vision of an ethically sensitive ruler
who finally acknowledges the validity of his antagonist's values and can
incorporate them in a marvellous political synthesis of contraries. This
interpretation is perfectly consistent with Anouilh's play. The text will support
the reading at a number of levels. But it is utterly at odds with the other great
interpretative tradition of the period.
For the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, there are no ethical
imperatives to motivate Antigone, no hope of some ultimate good deriving from
her suffering. His Antigone is a myth of the impenetrable mystery of human
identity - a play about a girl who is both sister and daughter to the same man,
utterly alone and indefinable. Her status is among the elect, and her destiny is to
find her self among the dead, in the company of Oedipus. Kierkegaard's heroine
is driven by the dark psychological motive to self-fulfillment through self-
destruction; and, as Anouilh puts it, we may never understand the fever that
consumes her. This is the Antigone who co-exists in Anouilh's text with the
Hegelian Antigone: the kinswoman of Oedipus, impatient with life, and
fanatically dedicated to a lonely isolation in her absurd selfhood. The
Kierkegaardian interpretation of Antigone is explicit in every explanation that
Creon offers of her extraordinary mode of suicidal conduct
How, finally, do we interpret Antigone? Perhaps, as George Steiner claims,
we must leave the theatre undecided and willing to ask the insistent questions
that admit of no simple solution. At what point does a conflict of ethical
opposites modulate into a conflict of extreme and obsessive follies? When does
the life-affirming "Yes" of Creon tip over into the shame of collaboration? When
does the passionate resistance of Antigone's "No" disintegrate into an
uncompromising rejection of life itself? Anouilh's Antigone permits our
indecision, but not our indifference to the issues he raises.
Errol Durbach
Professor Errol Durbach is Head of the Department of Theatre at UJB.C. ANTIGONE
By
Jean Anouilh
Set Design By
Robert Gardiner
Directed By
Brenda Leadlay
Costume Design By
Mara Gottler
Lighting Design By
Bill Rasmussen
CAST
Chorus Errol Durbach
Antigone Allison Sanders
Ismene Kathleen Duborg
Haemon James Binkley
Eurydice Michelle Stoppa
Nurse Laura K. Burke
Page Ira Winrob
Messenger Peter Wilds
First Guard (Jonas) Timothy Hyland
Second Guard Glen Thompson
Third Guard Kurt Eby
PRODUCTION
Technical Director Alan Brodie
Stage Manager Nik von Schulmann
Assistant Stage Manager.... Nick Davis
Properties Randall Plitt
Rehearsal Assistant Stage Manager Erin Jarvis
Wardrobe Mistress Catherine King
Costume Assistant Jill Buckham
Scenic Artists .Kairiin Bright, Paula Pryce, Siobhan Ryan
Properties Assistant Colin Lim
Sound Designer Darryll Patterson
Sound Operator John Henrickson
Lighting Operator Corin Gutteridge
Follow Spot Operator Randall Plitt
Make Up Nick Davis
Sculptors Heike Anderson, Alan Brodie,
Nancy Canning, John Henrickson
Lighting Crew Bruce Cobanli, Carol Evans, Glen Winter
Costume Supervisor Chelsea Moore
Set Construction... Don Griffiths, John Henrickson, Robert Moser
Costume Cutter Jean Driscoll-Bell
Box Office Carol Fisher, Linda McRae, Jason Smith
House Manager Tracy Holmes
Business Manager Marjorie Fordham
Production Robert Eberle
Time: Present
Antigone
is produced by special arrangement with
Samuel French (Canada) Inc.
Acknowledgements
CBC
Island Paper Mills Ltd.
Alan Salloway
UBC Gates Hair Fashion
Sarah Marshall Antigone
A Presentation of the Play
"ANTIGONE": Jean Anouilh projects his "tragedy", in contemporary
clothing, on the very steps of that Greek temple which we all carry within
ourselves, in the very aura of the Greek legend. Sophocles' prestige and an
atmosphere of Greek wisdom still suffuse these ancient tragic figures: Antigone
Ismene, Creon, themselves imbued with the blind light of Oedipus' drama.
What differences, however! Whilst he revives the subject of Antigone's
devotion up to self-sacrifice, the theme (that conflict between divine and human
laws) and even the dramatic mould of the play, Anouilh suffuses it with quite a
different spirit. "Never was Sophocles betrayed so well," under the guise of
following the Greek tragedy's pattern and rhythm.
A series of scenes first build upon each other, like steps to support the
central scene, the expected confrontation between Creon and Antigone. At the
beginning are the ascending degrees of a pathos loaded with tragic anguish
because of the Chorus's warnings and Antigone's alarming secrets: - the good
nurse scolding a girl who gets out of hand - the first revealing conflict, between
the two sisters, the too careful and dutiful Ismene and the foolish Antigone, who
refuses to understand the adults' reasons, precisely because she wants to live - and
the bitter farewell scene between Antigone and her fianc6 Haemon, in which the
burning call to tenderness turns into a blunt breaking off. But the guard arrives,
bearer of bad news: someone has infringed the King's orders, someone has
covered the corpse of Polyneices with earth. Then the Chorus comes on and,
with a sigh of relief, stresses the heroes' accession, beyond the vulgarity of
drama, to the superior kingdom of tragedy.
For the spectator, Antigone will henceforth embody the romanticism of
childhood, or rather of an image of childhood, prolonged, preserved, supposed to
be a marvelous place of fullness and purity; this does not prevent her from
showing quite a surprising firmness of character. The confrontation with Creon
will reveal to her more of herself, bringing her to cry aloud what she was not yet
aware of. Antigone's arrest, of course, follows; a symbolical scene, opposing the
delicate girl to the materialistic vulgarity of the guards, coarse people reeking of
garlic, leather and red wine.
This is also a prelude to the face to face encounter between uncle and niece,
in which the frail girl will appear a singularly tough and argumentative person
(as opposed to the gentle and pious Greek heroine who does not rebel against
Creon). Concerning this long discussion - about one third of the play; and one of
the strongest, most striking scenes of contemporary French theatre - it has not
been stressed enough that it is structured, punctuated by silences (accompanied
by stage movements; Creon taking off his jacket, etc.). The long scene is thus
divided into five or six successive parts. At first, the uncle resorts to protective
intimidation, to frighten and soften this urchin of a niece, while she is still
invoking her religious and human duty. - Soon, after a silence, the debate reaches
a new level, the awareness of the absurd: religious rites, as the antagonists
confess to each other, are but a derisory comedy. What, then, is left to Antigone
except the pride of her self-determination, with its existentialist overtones; I did
it "for no one else. For myself." - The third part, confronting the absolute "yes"
and "no", Creon's political realism and Antigone's uncompromising idealism,
seems to resound with the heroine's moral victory; she does her utmost to stress
the baseness of a King's job, while raising herself by her very refusals to a
Queen's nobleness ("Tragedy is for Kings," as the Chorus had announced). -
Silence - . As a last attempt the exhausted Creon discloses that Eteocles and
Polyneices, those revered brothers, were actually despicable hoodlums, low
brutes. Then, at this climactic moment of the play, Antigone, wounded,
suddenly hesitates: "I am going back up to my room." Is this Creon's victory at
last? - A long silence -. Fifth part: Creon, alas, starts again, in a humble voice,
offering the prospect of a mediocre, resigned, bourgeois happiness. A fatal
mistake, since Antigone pulls herself together and explodes with exasperation in
a final revolt: "I am fed up with your happiness!" Hadn't she refused it from the
beginning? This provocative attitude gets the desired result: 'Guards, take her
away!"
Now the game is over. And the tragic cascade of a stormy denouement links
together the various catastrophes: Haemon's revolt, in a harrowing confrontation
between father and son, between the adult's disillusioned lucidity and the
nostalgia of confident childhood: - Antigone's ultimate attempt to communicate
with human beings, orally with the guard, in writing with Haemon: "I no longer
know why I am going to death": - the report of Haemon's suicide at the feet of
Antigone hanged in her cave; - the report of Eurydice's, Creon's wife, suicide; -
the final solitude of Creon, still on his way to his 5 p.m. Cabinet meeting; like
a robot, crushed and emptied? or as a stoic philosopher resisting the absurd? One
does not know.
From all these debates, or rather commitments, a question inevitably arises:
whose attitude is the right one? Who is right, Creon or Antigone? Creon, after all, is something other than a despicable anti-hero. Should one
summarily tax him with mediocrity, moral weakness, political cynicism?
Actually, Anouilh's Creon, more dignified and human than the Greek one, has
accepted the unenviable part of leader out of "honesty". When he said "yes", it
was not without courage. He is like the Orestes of Sartre's Play The Flies
(1943), who would have agreed to govern Argos. He even assumes a certain
greatness in his abnegation, his sorrowful solitude. He is, henceforth, condemned
to political realism, which is not the best role, he knows, but rather an absurd
and futile job, like many. But "you still need someone to steer the boat," as
Creon stresses in one of his tirades, so wonderful in their energetic
expressiveness. The trouble is that, by obeying the reason of State, one ends up
firing into the crowd, at men who no longer have names; or killing a niece
without really intending to, after many efforts to save her. Can the lucid
awareness of his choice, and his endurance through his ordeal (whether stoic or
stupefied) save Creon, morally? He remains a prisoner of his role as chief of
State. But isn't he right at least to protest: "It's all too easy to say 'no'," to
existence; it is harder to say yes.
Witness here Antigone, the small, dark, ugly and nasty-tempered girl, taking
pleasure in avenging herself on those adults who didn't take her seriously. Don't
her constant refusals to understand, her categorical imperative of the "all or
nothing" make her, in a sense responsible for what may be called her suicide? In
the end, is her heroism, tainted with arrogance and nihilistic anarchism, not
complacent selfishness, lack of courage before real life?
No doubt, however, that Anouilh's Antigone is a very likeable character to
many. Why so? Because she inherits a long tradition of French heroism, such as
a Joan of Arc of today, elated by a need for the sublime, far above ordinary life's
contingencies. Also, her cry for freedom in her weakness and her opposition to
the reason of State symbolize, in 1944, the spirit of the French resistance to
German oppression. More profoundly, after rejecting vague religious beliefs and
familial attachments, she finds within herself enough strength to assert the only
value of individual freedom by a responsible choice, which soon becomes a total
commitment of herself, a commitment clearly resounding, in the 40's, with
existentialist echoes. Last, but not least, Antigone embodies a conflict of
generations, an eternal revolt of the young, who find themselves obliged to take
part, unwillingly, in an imperfect and absurd society.
Whose position is the right one? A troubling question. Anouilh has a bitter,
ardent dialogue with himself, hesitating between the honor (or dishonor?) of
living and the honor of dying. But he refrains from making a choice for us. The
stamp of artistic creators is recognizable precisely by that confrontation of
irreconcilable existential attitudes. It is up to each person to make the choice.
Dominique Baudouin
Professor Dominique Baudouin teaches in the Department of French at UJ3.C.
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