It is at this precise moment that Antigone becomes a waking nightmare for me. Ivo's choice of modern dress for the actors, the sleek grey set, with its shelves of surveillance tapes that could be any contemporary despot's headquarters, the harsh colloquial savour of Anne's translation (has the word pissant ever occurred before in a translation of a Greek tragedy?), all of it becomes horrifyingly one with present reality, and the wall between the theatre and the world I know collapses. “Look at what is happening to me,” Antigone cries, “and look at the men who are doing it.” The cry of raped, beaten, murdered women everywhere, in every time.
And look at the men who are doing it.
Once you observe Sophokles's past bleed into our present, the oppressive power of rulers and the weightless cries of those who oppose them, Antigone becomes all people oppressed by power. Antigone and our world contiguous now – they happen simultaneously, transparently, layer over accreting layer of injustice and suffering.
In the winter of 2015, author Will Aitken was invited to Luxembourg by his friend Anne Carson to watch the final rehearsals and world premiere of her new translation of Sophokles's Antigone, starring Juliette Binoche in the lead role, and directed by Ivo van Hove (who then went on to make an even bigger splash on Broadway). As a travel writer, lecturer on cinema, and arts journalist, Aitken was well-suited to the experience, but he couldn't have anticipated that watching this phenomenal production would bring on a bout of his recurring depression; that it would lead to a suicide plan for him and his dog. While Aitken eventually weathered the depression with psychiatric help, Antigone's voice to power continued to haunt him and he decided to investigate the play further; Antigone Undone is the result of his research.
In a Preface, Aitken lays out the book's structure: Part I is in diary form, written while Aitken was in Luxembourg, and then briefly in Amsterdam. Part 2 is a “collage interview” with Carson, van Hove, and Binoche as they discuss the creative process behind bringing the play to stage (“collage” meaning that Aitken interviewed each of them separately and then spliced relevant parts together into one conversation). Part 3 traces Antigone's effect on thinkers throughout the years – from Hegel and Heidegger to Virginia Woolf and Judith Butler – and the book ends with a “coda”, wherein Aitken meets up again with Carson and Binoche after the play's final performance to learn how Antigone affected them. As might be expected, this format led to an uneven reading experience for me – I was interested in the personal bits (whether from Aitken or insight into the others' creative processes), and while I found the collage interview to be a dry format (like reading a transcript), I did like the diary format in the beginning:
This time round, alone in a distant city, the desolation feels different. The misery doesn't begin and end with me, as is customary. Instead it flows from the world and the clarity of great art. How comforting to label Sophokles's bleak vision phantasmagoric, demonic, hellish. Except it's nothing of the kind. Sophokles articulates suffering with a scary aplomb laced with scathing wit. That his world mimics my world terrifies me, for it flattens promise and any possibility of forward motion.The third part was maybe the least interesting to me: Aitken goes both too lengthy and not deep enough into these other thinkers' writings on Antigone, almost like he was trying to stretch his admittedly intriguing personal experience out to book length...I did find it of interest to note that Sophokles set his story in Thebes, in a time that was ancient to his audience of the day, in order to comment on the despotic politics of his own day; a commentary that is still relevant to modern audiences, millennia later. In the end, it's as the chorus says:
many things strangeInteresting concept; maybe didn't need to be padded out to (even short) book length.
terrible
clever
wondrous
monstrous
marvellous
dreadful
awful
and
weird
there are in the world
but none more
strange
terrible
clever
uncanny
wondrous
monstrous
marvellous
dreadful
awful
and
weird
than Man.
