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antigone

».. .Under the guidance of Nancy Meokler, the company's grandly gifted director, the players have taken a central theme from »Antigone« which shows the tension between the demands of the state and the courage of the individual which overrides it. They have devised a series of images to mirror and illuminate this antagonism; it is not so much an attempt to create the circumstances of the original play, more a sequence of episodes which reveals the company's style.

This version of »Antigona« exists as an interplay of voice and song, movement and mime, sound and gesture. We lose sight of that porcess in which Sophocles suggest the discrepancy between a wish and its fulfilment, but new merits are discovered. The choric to the glory of man is suggested in a mobile tableau, a miniature life-sequence of labouring, sighing, interacting bodies; graduaiy they are caught in a crescendo of energy. The volume of the words increases, the movements quichen, like the rising of the sun in Ravel’s »Daphnis and Chloe«.

The company conceive Queen Eurydice’s death as a horrifyng word-ballet in which both the queen and her mes-

senger are overwhelmed. He holds the woman (in his arms as, in gasping voice, he describes the circumstances of her son's death. Life begins to seep away from her body as if all the breath and vitality was being inexorably drained away until her head sinks to the ground like a great rag doll, the mouth caught open in a soundless scream. Where Sophocles makes Antigone heroic the Freehold concentrate on her tragedy. Under a fading light she compresses her life’s might-have-been into fleeting, evanescent images of happiness. This production concentrates, however, on less cerebral theatrical exploration, it tries to suggest how the words or the ideas of a play can be complemented by physical movement. The agitated patterns traced by the chorus around King Oreon as he pleads with his son are omnious indications of the destruction which he is to bring upon himself. They show how the range of the speaking, singing, toneless voice can add dimension to the final scene In which man’s inhumanity is finally underlined .. .«

iMerste Bates

THE GUARDIAN. Nov. 22, 69