With his new version for Prime Cut Productions, Belfast playwright Owen McCafferty joins the ranks of Irish writers - Tom Paulin, Conall Morrison, Seamus Heaney - who have adapted Antigone in recent years. Set in the aftermath of a civil war, Sophocles's tragedy has intense resonance in post-conflict Northern Ireland. While McCafferty, who also directs, does not update the action explicitly, his urgent script eloquently achieves the transposition.
The Chorus, an Old Man, has some of the most blackly comic lines, as he hauls body bags around the broken-down palace. Swearing at each other in the heat of anger, Antigone and her uncle Creon are flawed, all-too-human characters, rather than mouthpieces for a moral argument about the power of the state versus religious allegiance. Ian McElhinney plays Creon as a blunt military man attempting to assert control over the devastated city of Thebes. He struggles to keep his composure in the face of provocation not only from Antigone, but the Old Man and Tiresias. "You are a whore governed by nothing more than greed and lies," he spits at the blind seer.
Conflict also boils over between Creon and his defiant son Haimon, superbly played by Paul Mallon. Barely contained physical aggression is evident throughout; McCafferty seems to be straining against the highly disciplined form of Greek tragedy, in which violence is kept offstage. The resulting tension makes the play brilliantly immediate.
