Claire Armitstead (Ancient tales are back in fashion – for telling it like it is, 16 July) is only partly right. Surely the truth is that these tales were never out of fashion. Take Sophocles’ Antigone; before Kamila Shamsie updated the play, Jean Anouilh in France in 1944 used it as a parable of resistance versus collaboration, and Seamus Heaney, in The Burial at Thebes in 2003, discerned its connection to the Iraq invasion and the war against terror. Long before Anouilh, Sigmund Freud found the germ of his most famous theory in Sophocles’ Oedipus. And before Freud, George Eliot looked to Sophocles for the “delineation of primitive emotions”. Because they go to the dark core of human experience, these plays and tales will never lose their relevance.
Harry Eyres
London
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