Seamus Heaney's version of 'Antigone', which is about to open at the Abbey, revisits fundamental issues, writes Eileen Battersby.
A sister defies the law to bury an outlawed brother denied burial by official decree. The king sees no humanity in her act, only betrayal. The chorus, society, looks on, compromised by the need to comply with a ruler intent on revenge.
Sounds familiar? Sounds contemporary? Of course it does: by such ruthlessness is power maintained. Or is it? The story is not a new one. The Greek tragedian Sophocles of Athens, who lived in the fifth century BC, wrote Antigone, the first of his Theban plays, as a study of conflict. Antigone mourns her dead brother and breaks the law. King Creon exceeds the dictates of power, a dangerous over-reaching. His son, Haemon, instead of marrying Antigone, must reject his father; he chooses to die with his bride-to-be.
It is a chilling tale and a timeless one. Antigone's dilemma is a fundamental issue of honour. The play remains a foundation text of European theatre. Brecht was drawn to it. As was Anouilh. The French playwright revisited the play for his version, which was performed in 1942 during the German occupation. Initially reacting to the drama as theatre, audiences were to slowly grasp that Creon, a plausible enough characterisation, personified Vichy compromise, while Antigone was none other than France at its most idealistic. The politics of Antigone would never be lost on an artist as politically alert as Seamus Heaney, the Noble laureate in literature.
An autobiographical but never confessional writer, Heaney the poet - who has always remained a teacher in the most honourable and generous sense of the word - is at once direct and complex; his response to the political remains shrewdly subtle.
"I taught Antigone to college students in a Belfast teacher-training college in 1963. I talked about it in relation to Aristotle and Greek tragedy. Five years later, in October 1968, I read Conor Cruise O'Brien in the Listener using Antigone to illuminate the conflict in Northern Ireland - the conflict that is within individuals as well as within the society. Antigone and her sister, Ismene, represent two opposing impulses that often co-exist: the impulse to protect and rebel and the impulse to conform for the sake of a quiet life. From that moment on Antigone was more than a piece of the academic syllabus: it was a lens that helped to inspect reality more clearly."
Incidentally, in the same issue of the Listener, Heaney, then an emerging young poet with one collection, Death Of A Naturalist (1966), to his credit, contributed "Old Derry's Walls", an article written in response to an RUC attack on a civil-rights march in Derry.
Antigone is a play that has endured, while Antigone as a character continues to impress and inspire as a heroine of conscience as well as courage. And it is that conscience, even more than the courage, that has inspired other writers to observe her, and the play, again and again. For Heaney, the Abbey's commission to write a new version as part of the theatre's centenary celebrations initially seemed to carry more obligation than inspiration.
"I was a bit wary. Others had been there before me: Tom Paulin, Marianne McDonald [to whom his version is dedicated\], Brendan Kennelly, Conall Morrison and Aidan Carl Mathews. I thought to myself, how many more Antigones did Irish theatre need?" He laughs, lifts his hands and offers an expression of bewildered amusement. There was also the sense of a return. Like a fellow Irish Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats, before him, he had already explored the art of Sophocles. In 1990, Heaney, "not a passionate theatre-goer and no playwright", wrote a version of Philoctetes, one of the least performed of the great Athenian's seven surviving works from the 100 plays he wrote during his 90-year life. Inspired by the text, Heaney called his version The Cure At Troy.
Drawn to it because he wanted to contribute to Field Day Theatre Company,'s repertoire, he says, "The theme of that play is also about the conflict between personal integrity and political expediency". With a grimace that speaks volumes he adds: "I liked the title." The production had its difficulties, and the play had none of the unexpected humour presented by the palace guard, which counters the multiple agonies of Antigone.
"First of all, the title tells what happens in the play: Philoctetes' poisonous wound is cured. Secondly, that cure is miraculous, and the Irish ear is still ready to detect a miraculous dimension in the word cure. The Cure At Troy, The Burial At Thebes, there's a nice balance there, in the shape of the phrases. I think 'cure' and 'burial' both retain a sacral resonance, and in that way they remind a modern audience, subliminally, of the sacred element in Greek tragedy."
His initial reluctance to add yet another Antigone to the Irish repertoire dissolved with a new sense of the play's relevance after September 11th. "There was the general worldwide problem where considerations of state security posed serious threats to individual freedom and human rights. Then there was the obvious parallel between George W. Bush and Creon."
The issue of describing Heaney's treatment of the play as a translation, adaptation or simply version is quickly settled.
"It's not a translation. I worked off the existing 19th-century translation by [R. C.\] Jebb and the Loeb [Classical Library\] standard one. You could say: he knows no Greek. I know it says 'translated by' on the cover. But it's not a translation. It's a version. I was looking for meaning, not language.
"Jebb, for example, and E.F. Watling, who did the old Penguin translations of The Theban Plays, were under an obligation to render the Greek correctly. They had a scholarly discipline to obey. I, on the other hand, did want to give the substance of the meaning, but my first consideration was speakability. I also wanted different registers, in the musical sense, for different characters and movements in the play. You could say mine is a parallel text. I hope I haven't hijacked it."
He hasn't. It is an atmospheric version that gains much energy and dramatic fire from the characterisation. Above all the text acquires further physicality through Heaney's instinctively graceful and earthy feel for the right word.
Tone holds the key to texture. He refers to searching for tone, "this looking for the music of the thing". He says: "You only have to look at the Greek text in the Loeb edition to see that there are different metres, different line lengths. Obviously, the choruses are elaborate, lyric speech. Creon has a steady, regular form of utterance. Antigone's pleas are in a shorter, more intense register. I just wanted to give equivalent variations in my own English."
This search led him to the three distinct verse tunes heard in his text. There is also, of course, the central vernacular prose daringly spat out by the indignant palace guard who supplies the unexpected humour upon which the play spins. Falsely accused of burying Polyneices, Antigone's brother, who has been denounced as a traitor, the guard who merely reported the illegal burial instead speaks back to Creon, suggesting: "Your conscience is what's doing the disturbing." The guard has a Shakespearean, quasi-comic candour. On capturing Antigone, he rises to verse and is quick to remind the king of his "tongue-lashing".
In many ways the guard is a secondary teller of truths who prepares the way for the play's main truth-teller, Tiresias, at his most Beckett-like in Heaney's version. In Sophocles himself lies the essential conflict between Creon and Antigone.
"Sophocles was a member of the Athenian elite," says Heaney. "He held public office and obviously sympathised with Creon's sense of order, but he had an artist's instinctive solidarity with the individual sense of honour."
Why have so many of Ireland's leading writers been drawn to reworking versions of classic works? It seems churlish to ask this of Heaney, whose majestic rendition of Beowulf caught the essential quasi-pagan, quasi-Christian grandeur of the great Anglo-Saxon epic, and brought it beyond the universities to a wider reading public. But he smiles as he replies, "because classics endure". Then he takes us to a deeper level.
"Because of a situation in this country over the past few decades we have all been driven back to first principles: the relationship between men and women, the problem of justice for the victims, the problem of establishing a commonly agreed system of government. All these fundamental issues are plied with total clear-sightedness for the first time in the Greek classics. But that does not mean that the last word has been spoken."
The Burial At Thebes, Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles' Antigone, opens at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on Monday. The play is published by Faber and Faber