Antigone

This version of Sophocles’s 2,500 year-old tragedy starts in a blur of ‘blud’, ‘fam’ and ‘crew’. Ancient Greece this is not; adapter Roy Williams instead puts us in a modern, grungy, urban Thebes surrounded by motorways and full of gang warfare.

Creon becomes Creo, the newly crowned ‘king’ of the city, who rules the streets with a band of tooled-up bredrin. Antigone’s brothers, who led rival sides in the in-fighting, have been killed. Creo wants to honour one brother, and leave the other’s body out to rot to make an example of his treachery. But loyal Antigone, or Tig, is having none of that. She defies him and covers up her brother’s damaged corpse, which provokes the fury of Creo, setting her on the path to destruction.

It’s a hot-blooded, spunky adaptation and Williams’s dialogue, shot through with street slang and spoken with a mix of Caribbean and London accents, keeps a lot of the original’s poetry. But it also shifts the focus on to Creo; it is a tale of his downfall, rather than of Antigone’s defiance. And in this it loses something: stories of powerful men getting their comeuppance are ten-a-penny, and though this is an important theme in the original, Antigone is a remarkable creation. Here she is a pissed-off girl: a woman angry, yes, but her character is not allowed the space or poise to show how noble and justified she is in her anger.

Marcus Romer’s production for Pilot Theatre rushes through some of the more important speeches, giving the play’s form priority over its language, which means we often lose the nuances of the text. Romer uses video of different angles of the action projected on the crumbling pillars and walls of Joanna Scotcher’s evocative concrete jungle designs. It’s a nice reminder of those omnipotent gods of the original, watching over the action as the characters rush around fucking everything up.

A great cast keep up the pace and humour, especially Mark Monero as a cockerel-like Creo and Gamba Cole as his wretched son, fiercely in love with Savannah Gordon-Liburd’s fine Antigone. Doreene Blackstock is excellent as Creo’s wife Eunice, providing a little of the tense, if vicious, dignity that Antigone’s character sorely lacks.

A strong night, but the lack of fire in its eponymous heroine’s belly lets it down.