Two recent productions have raised the bar for Sophoclean interpretations, each exemplifying the radically different approaches you can take to the dramatist. Lucy Pitman-Wallace's Nottingham Playhouse production of The Burial at Thebes (Seamus Heaney's version of the Antigone legend) was an austere, choric spectacle. Jonathan Kent's urgent, modern-dress Oedipus at the National Theatre, meanwhile, treats attic tragedy as a branch of current affairs.
A credit in the programme for Greg Hersov's new production acknowledging Greater Manchester Police for the loan of riot shields makes clear the way things will be heading here. Though the physical location is never identified, its parched and cracked appearance looks conspicuously like the aftermath of a desert storm. Under these conditions, Antigone's crime of performing an illicit burial might be seen less as a seditious challenge to the authority of the state than a criminal misuse of dust.
The chief benefit of Hersov's approach is its easy accessibility. Creon is portrayed as a consummate modern politician who strides in shaking hands with the audience. And, though Andrew Sheridan's bug-eyed messenger perhaps delivers more laughs than Sophocles intended, Hersov realises that Greek tragedy is never unreservedly tragic.
That said, there are aspects of Don Taylor's chatty, colloquial translation that strike one as a little bathetic. The image of Antigone "stubbing her toe against the marble steps of law" sounds like a minor mishap rather than a bruising encounter with inviolable fate; while the description of hell as Persephone's hotel sounds like it has been lifted from the Rough Guide to the Underworld.
Matti Houghton uses such informality to her advantage, however, conceiving the heroine as a vulnerable, highly engaging personality. In many cases Antigone's commitment to her cause, admirable though it may be, can seem a little priggish. Houghton, however, gives the impression of an orphaned child whose actions are motivated less by an obsession with martyrdom than a comforting belief in the prospect of rejoining her family on the other side.
It befalls Ian Redford's Creon to formulate a rational response to an opponent who does not behave rationally. Far from being an unyielding tyrant, Redford seems remarkably reasonable, though his reference to "special techniques" of interrogation indicates otherwise. But it is precisely this paranoid ability to perceive the enemy everywhere that makes Sophocles seem so unerringly modern.
