Antigone
(Jean Anouilh)
Created during the Nazi occupation of Paris in the Second
World War, Jean Anouilh?s adaptation of Antigone is an
allegory of resistance against totalitarian control.
Produced in a very modern way, the chorus is now reduced to
a single narrator who addresses the audience and leads them
through the events of the tragedy. The characters,
modernized to appeal to a 1940s audience, carry out the
action with cigarettes and automobiles. Antigone, the
daughter of Oedipus and sister to Ismene, Polyneices and
Eteocles, resolves to bury her brother Polyneices after he
and Eteocles die fighting each other over the thrown.
Creon, now turned into a blind totalitarian despot, refuses
to honor Polyneices with a proper burial and makes a decree
banning anyone else from doing so either.
The play?s characters are poweful metaphors for French
collaboration and resistance to Nazi rule. Ismene,
presenting the collaborators opinion, fights with her
sister over what should be done after Creon?s decree.
Though she also hates the thought of Polyneices being left
unburied, she is afraid of Creon?s wrath and decides to
take the sensible, or cowardly, course and do nothing and
lay low. Antigone voices the opinion of the French
Resistance, where such lack of action by Ismene is actually
consent to Creon?s tyranny. Antigone, resolute and sure of
what is right, vows to bury and rebury if necessary her
brother even though she wants to live herself, loves life,
and loves her fiancé Haemon. Antigone?s battles with Creon
over what is right and Creon, much more human in Anouilh?s
tale, acts as the French politicians, trying to save
Antigone but trapped by his own decisions and refusal to
admit that he might be wrong.
The end is the same as in Sophocles? tragedy. Antigone
hangs herself and her fiancé Haemon also kills himself in
despair of her death. The play shows a poignant human
reaction to Greek Tragedy, by showing Antigone?s fear of
death and her feeling at the end that maybe it was
unnecessary, but carried along by her knowledge of what is
right and necessary of her conscience.
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