Adapted for the stage from Hölderlin's transmission by Bertolt Brecht
"Ungeheuer is much. But nothing / More monstrous than man." These words from Friedrich Hölderlin's translation of the Greek classic have since become proverbial and capture the action of the play in verse. In the family saga surrounding the tyrant Creon, war and violence, robbery, murder and manslaughter, revenge and betrayal reign. But in the figure of Antigone, humanity also looms large.
The drama centers on Antigone's resistance to Creon's tyranny. The conflict ignites over a funeral. Antigone wants to bury her slain brother with full honors; which Creon refuses the "traitor" he believes him to be. She demands justice; he lives under the delusion that he must always be right. Creon: "Never an enemy, even when dead, becomes a friend." Antigone: "But surely. For hate not, for love I live."
The 1000-year Reich, as Hitler fantasized it would be, lay in ruins after 12 years, when playwright Bertolt Brecht returned to Europe from American exile. He wondered what a new beginning for the theatre might look like amidst the remnants of the old, and he answered by resorting to an ancient material, which he reworked. His new version of Sophocles' "Antigone", first performed in Switzerland in 1948, builds on Hölderlin's rewriting and tells a "highly realistic folk legend". Brecht demystifies the material. An ancient saga becomes a topical drama.
If one views Sophocles/Hölderlin/Brecht's "Antigone" from today's perspective, the view expands into the fundamental and at the same time offers an acute model. The play is to be understood as a rejection of any insane or dictatorial allure of rule. It provides an exemplary example of civil disobedience, opposes all discrimination and calls for resistance to injustice and all violence.
In a poem, Brecht asks the dead Antigone to take the stage once more:
"Antigone, come out of the twilight and go / Before us a time, / Kind, with light step / Of the quite determined, terrible / The terrible. / Averted, I know / How you feared death, but / More you fear / Unworthy to live. / And let the mighty / Nothing through."
M.K.
Source and further information: http://www.staatstheater-wiesbaden.de/programm/spielplan/die-antigone-des-sophokles-2017-2018/4925/
