Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✩✩
by Jean Anouilh, directed by Chris Abraham
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
September 17-October 17, 2009
"The Devil is in the Details"
Soulpepper’s first foray into ancient Greek tragedy comes in the mediated form of Jean Anouilh’s 1944 French adaptation of Sophocles’ “Antigone” (442 BC), first staged in occupied France, where it resonated strongly with conflict of the Resistance and the Nazi’s puppet government. While the performances of Liisa Repo-Martell as Antigone and R.H. Thomson as Creon are superb, uneven acting among the rest of the cast and odd directorial and design decisions undermine their effectiveness.
For those unfamiliar with the story, the events of Antigone take place after those depicted in Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and “Oedipus at Colonus” and picks up the action directly after Aeschylus’ “Seven Against Thebes”. After Oedipus' death, his sons, Antigone’s brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, were to rule Thebes in alternate years. After the first year Eteocles refused to step down causing Polyneices to raise and army to oust him. In battle both kill each other so rule of Thebes passes to their uncle Creon. In an attempt to quash further rebellion, Creon gives Eteocles a state funeral as the defender of the state and dishonours Polyneices by leaving him unburied and prey to wild animals. Creon decrees that anyone who attempts to bury Polyneices will be executed. Antigone, engaged to Creon’s son Haemon, is outraged and manages to partially bury the body despite the guards in constant watch over it. Sophocles‘ play and Anouilh’s adaptation begin just after Antigone has done this deed.
Anouilh’s adaptation updates the action to the present but its most important change is to eliminate the character of the prophet Tiresias in Sophocles who enters to warn Creon that the gods support Antigone and he will bring on his own downfall if he opposes her. Anouilh thus sets the action purely in the human realm. At first it seems to represent the struggle of the individual (Antigone) against the state (Creon), but as the play progresses and the futility of Antigone’s action is made clear, it comes to represent to the existential choice to live and die an “authentic” life, in Sartre’s phrase, or to live one of compromise.
Director Chris Abraham seems to be fully aware of this, but many of his and the designers’ decisions mar the play’s effectiveness. He has coarsened and coloquialized Lewis Galantière’s 1947 translation, so that modern inanities like “ I think I know where Creon is coming from” sit uneasily alongside Anouilh’s poetic prose.
For Creon’s office where all the action takes place, Lorenzo Savoini has created a room of full-height raised-panelled walls of dark wood, looking at once both elegant and funereal. To make an allusion to classical Greek theatre, the single large door should ideally be placed in the centre of the back wall. Savoini has it in the side stage left. Worse, he has inset part of that wall with a bank of CCTV monitors which not only have become a design cliché but are in fact too small to be useful. Worst, however, is the large square column he places in the middle of the stage left playing area. While this gives the room a sense of weight, it also forces the vast majority of the action into the stage right half of the stage. I, sitting in house right, found my head turned for uncomfortably long periods toward the stage right for the intermissionless one hour and forty minutes.
Dana Osborn’s costumes are appropriate given the modern setting. Giving Repo-Martell to make her look like a young girl is simple but effective. Giving Jordan Pettle as Haemon a hoodie, however, is a mistake. He’s the king’s son, not some teenager hanging out in the mall. Giving a jacket and tie to the little boy who serves as Creon’s page made him look silly. And I do wish he did not have to pull out a PDA near the end to check Creon’s schedule and thus ruin the sombre mood with unintended humour.
Liisa Repo-Martell as Antigone and R.H. Thomson as Creon are equally intense as they must be for the play to work. Repo-Martell shows us an Antigone, so deeply affected by the past horrors she has seen, that she already seems more at home with death than life when we first meet her. Her haunted expression, her odd laughs to herself, are chilling. As Anouilh’s intended her inability to compromise seems both heroic and absurd, in the existential sense, at the same time. Meanwhile, Thomson paints a masterful portrait of a man who never sought to rule, but having the reins wants to impose order to break with the multiple tragedies of the past. The irony is, of course, that the very rigour he imposes leads only to further tragedy. Thomson’s depiction of when this dawns on Creon is shattering.
A third fine performance comes from Jeff Lillico as the Guard, the common man caught up in the life-or-death struggle between uncle and niece that he doesn’t understand. Claire Calnan as Antigone’s superficial sister Ismene is meant to be a foil to Antigone’s intensity but need not be quite so devoid of personality as here. Jordan Pettle does really seem to become fully engaged with his role as Haemon until he confront Creon at the end. Maggie Huculak is oddly hysterical as Antigone’s Nurse, certainly not the one to comfort and calm others as one would expect. The most bizarre performance, however, comes from David Storch as the Chorus, who also pitches in to play a few bit parts. This is the role Laurence Olivier played at the work’s English-language premiere in 1949. Storch speaks in the oddly hollow voice he has lately been cultivating, which works well in comedy, since it makes anything serious he says sound ridiculously pedantic. Here it is totally inappropriate, as are his sudden, inexplicable fits of shouting. Rather than dispassionate or wryly ironic guide to the action he should be, he seems more like a mad professor. With such strength in Repo-Martell, Thomson and Lillico, it is a pity that Abraham allows so many rogue details to get in the way.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Liisa Repo-Martell and R.H. Thomson. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2009-09-30
Antigone