Kommentar |
The Greek myth recounted in Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone has invited a wealth of artistic and philosophical adaptations since the play’s first performance in the fifth century BC. The scandal that initiates the tragedy’s action, Antigone’s insistence to bury her brother Polyneices against the order of King Creon, her uncle, has made the play attractive for modern audiences, because it raises fundamental questions about order and resistance, state and individuality, male dominance and female rebellion, and the conflicting obligations deriving from nationality, religion, and kinship. In this seminar, we will first discuss Sophocles’s play and its current staging at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater. We will then consider theatrical adaptations of Antigone in postcolonial contexts: Seamus Heaney’s free translation The Burial at Thebes (2004) for Dublin’s Abbey theatre, Athol Fugard’s play The Island (1973) set in the South-African prison on Robben Island where the Apartheid regime incarcerated political prisoners, and Femi Osofisan’s Nigerian adaptation in Tegonni: An African Antigone (1999). Our discussion will also take into account theoretical perspectives on Antigone, chiefly Judith Butler’s book Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (2000), which reconsiders Antigone’s feminist and sexual agency. It will be one of the aims throughout the seminar to explore the gendered forms of authority and resistance as staged in the Anglophone Antigones and to discuss the implications of Butler’s notion of gender performativity for the theatrical performances. To prepare for this seminar, please read the English-Greek version of Sophocles’s Antigone, which you can find here: Please register on moodle once you have been admitted to the course; the password is “Ismene”. |