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Theatre - Drama
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Helen
Vincent, as Antigone, and Clem van der Weegen as
Creon.
| Young cast shows what can be
done
Antigone - Adapted by Jamshid
Malekpour and Shala Mirbakhtyar. The Shiraz Theatre, 8pm
tonight
By ALANNA MACLEAN
THIS ANTIGONE is rather special.
No pseudo-classical Athens here. Instead the production
moves us firmly into a 21st century war zone, where cars
drive menacingly around in the night, messengers arrive
desperately on bicycle, and Creon has all the blindness
of a leader who does not know when to stop
fighting.
The audience is ferried in a mini-bus
through a wasteland of casualties as if it is on a
fact-finding mission, seeing but not touching..
Then
it is seated along each side of the huge Old Bus Depot
space and the story of Oedipus's daughters begins with a
furtive meeting where Antigone (Helen Vincent) and
Ismene (Blaide Lallemand) argue by the light of their
car headlights above the noise of a running car
engine.
Headlights, working lights, candles and
hand-held torches make for an atmosphere of realistic
political comment. Should a brother who is a traitor not
be given a proper burial? Should Creon be able to
execute Antigone for giving the dead their proper due?
When does the cycle of war stop?
The mood is
powerful. A mostly young cast does very well with the
play, despite an occasional lack of vocal variation and
a tendency to confuse projection with shouting.
(Caroline Huf as the Leader of the Chorus and Phil
Birch-Marston as a Dr Strangelove of a blind prophet
Tiresias show how it should be done.)
But it is the
images that carry the evening. Cars driving along the
space, headlights picking out figures, the arrival of
the Chorus on the back of a ute, oil drums rolling, a
guitar quietly playing and Antigone going with a
wonderful fierceness to death while rain falls on the
cars and the Chorus carries black umbrellas
It just
proves what can be done with an imaginative use of
resources in one of those rough spaces that this city
ought to be cherishing more than it
does.
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