Bush administration, which, in the process, saps it of all nuance. In lieu of offering a deeper understanding, Heaney has taken Sophocles' 2,500-year-old family-versus-state drama and turned it into a polemic against the George W. While the Nobel laureate has an immense talent for imagery (particularly when it comes to the subject of bird droppings, described several times in vivid detail), it feels like pretty window dressing on an old house. It's hard to see what new revelations Heaney has brought to Antigone. Creon (Paul O’Brien) and the Guard (Colin Lane) listen as Tiresias (Robert Langdon Lloyd, center) delivers a prophecy of impending doom.Īlthough written in 2004, the play generally proceeds in a manner consistent with an ancient Greek drama: There are extended monologues about the exciting things happening offstage, moralistic proclamations from the chorus, and oodles of self-pity from the principal players. He hurtles toward the play's tragic conclusion with an overpowering hubris, that most classical of fatal flaws. Blind prophet Tiresias (the eerie and sage-like Robert Langdon Lloyd) cautions that this course of action can only anger the Gods, but Creon remains unmoved. This is a particularly fraught decision since she is betrothed to his only son, Haemon (Ciarán Bowling). Creon angrily enforces his law, entombing Antigone alive. Surviving sister Antigone (Rebekah Brockman) disobeys Creon anyway so that Polyneices can pass to the underworld in peace. He further rules that anyone who defies this order be put to death. He has decreed that Eteocles (who defended the city from attack) get a hero's burial, but that Polyneices (the attacker) be left to rot in the Mediterranean sun. The two sons of Oedipus, Eteocles, and Polyneices have killed each other in combat, leaving their uncle, Creon (Paul O'Brien), in command of the city. The play begins at the end of the Theban civil war. While the Irish Rep's take eschews the half-face masks of that earlier production, it feels no less cold and distant, strongly suggesting that this tone comes baked into the text.
It is now receiving its first major New York City production with Irish Repertory Theatre at the DR2 Theatre (the play officially debuted in the city during a brief 2006 off-off-Broadway run with the now-defunct Handcart Ensemble). Such is the case with The Burial at Thebes, the late Seamus Heaney's adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone. The playwright may not be the God of the theater, but he certainly wields an inordinate amount of power over the fate of a production.
Colin Lane, Katie Fabel, Paul O’Brien, and Rebekah Brockman star in Seamus Heaney’s ‘’The Burial at Thebes”, directed by Charlotte Moore for The Irish Repertory Theatre at the DR2 Theatre.
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