Review Round-up: Findlay’s Antigone

“Early
in Polly
Findlay’s superb new staging
of Sophocles’ Antigone in
the Olivier Theatre, the chorus, or office staff, of the new head of
state, Creon, gather round a television to see what’s happening
outside. Instantly we think of that photograph of Barack Obama,
Hillary Clinton and other White House officials glued to the small
screen video link during the final raid on Osama bin Laden’s
hide-out. It’s just one way of registering the immediacy of the
play, but there is no clumsy emphasis on modern application …
This Antigone shows
as clearly as any I’ve seen that catastrophe is most unimaginable
to those who perpetrate it, unimaginable until the dead lie bundled
up in rows like children in Syria.”

Andrzej
Lukowsji
Time
Out
★★★★

“Twenty-nine-year-old
director Polly Findlay makes her Olivier debut with impressive
assurance, sweeping a 2,500 year old tragedy (Sophocles‘s
Antigone) and a 48-year-old screen star
(Christopher Eccleston) into her bold modernisation of an ancient
parable of state arrogance … The keynote is Eccleston’s channelling
of Tony Blair. It’s not an impersonation, but his precise, repetitive
diction, mannered body language, cool unflappability and, above all,
unshakeable belief in the rightness of his deeply unpopular cause –
in this case executing his niece,
Antigone, for defying the law by burying her traitorous brother
Polynices – unerringly invokes one
man’s slippery spirit. It is a superb portrait and critique of the
scariest sort of politician: one actually driven by ideology … The
production teeters after Teiresias’s late introduction, flailing to
regain context. But it pulls it back for the devastating final scene,
in which, after a triple tragedy, Creon’s spirit is finally broken –
not in spite of his unshakeable faith, but because of it.”

Michael
Billington
Guardian
★★★★

“The
one problem with putting the play into modern dress is that it
brings with it too many associations. When Creon invokes “the
power of the state” we tend to shudder, whereas the play’s
original spectators would probably have sympathised with his argument
that loyalty to city or country supersedes that to family or friends.
But Findlay avoids turning the piece into a moral melodrama in which
a virtuous Antigone confronts a wicked tyrant … Eccleston’s Creon
is not evil but fatally in thrall, like many modern politicians, to
the idea that authority is somehow inviolable. Jodie Whittaker‘s
Antigone is no bright-eyed martyr – simply a dogged, determined
young woman who believes nothing is more important than the debt we
owe to family and the dead. It is a wonderfully single-minded
performance, and there is strong support all round … But what this
production, aided by Soutra Gilmour‘s set and Dan Jones‘s sound
design, does superbly is usher us into a world of self-regarding
power that falls apart through its neglect of instinctive human
feeling.”

Quentin
Letts
Daily
Mail
★★★★

Christopher
Eccleston combines a rangy physical presence with a temple-twitching
intensity. One of his trademarks is an exaggerated precision in
speech, his mouth almost doubling its movements as he delivers the
words. How well this suits Creon as he tussles with his intransigence
and confronts the fate imposed on him by merciless gods … Jodie
Whittaker’s Antigone did not strike me an immediately warm figure.
She seems pinched, pulled in, her vocal tone mean. This increases the
objectivity of the play but it perhaps robs us of a dollop of pathos
… But on the whole this is an admirably direct rendition of a
topical dilemma: the balance, in politics and elsewhere, between
decisiveness and moderation.”

Libby
Purves
Daily
Mail
★★★★

“This
21st-century interpretation burns particularly hard into our age.
Costume and scene remind us of what we know too well in the age of
Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad, especially after this week’s appalling
news from Syria. It’s not about togas and robes: superstitious,
stubborn, paranoid tyrants whose word is death have suits and ties
and CCTV and bustling modern offices, and look just like our own
leaders … Eccleston’s Creon is the most curious, ultimately
gripping performance. At first a chunky crop-haired politico, he
seems appropriately wooden and bereft of feeling. But as doubt of his
own rightness assails him he warms into vulnerability and madness. In
the ghastly triple denouement his “I am nothing! I want nothing! My
last, simplest prayer!” rings chill round the great auditorium.”