1. Antigone
Sophocles

2. Juliette Binoche as Antigone, 2015

3. ANTIGONE. When they say law they do not mean a statute of today or yesterday They mean the unwritten unfaltering unshakable ordinances of the gods that no human being can ever outrun These laws live forever No one knows how they were born You thought I would transgress them for fear of some mere mortal man’s decree? No Translation by Anne Carson

4. Antigone shows the struggle “between elemental tendencies and established laws by which the outer life of man is gradually and painfully brought into harmony with his inward needs.” - George Eliot

5. “Some of us have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie.” - Percy Shelley

6. “More than any other surviving Greek tragedy… Antigone dramatizes the meshing of intimate and public, of private and historical existence.” George Steiner. Antigones. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984.

7. Creon
Laius
Jocasta
Eurydice
Haimon
Oedipus
Ismene
Antigone
Eteocles
Eteocles
Polyneices
Polyneices

8. “[T]he tragedy, in all its richness and diversity of theme is embodied in the idea of simple confrontation.” David Seale. Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

9. Antigone vs. Ismene
Creon vs. Antigone
Creon vs. Haimon
Creon vs. Tiresias

10. Stichomythia
ISMENE.
Antigone, you are mad! What could I possibly do? ANTIGONE.
You must decide whether you will help me or not.
I do not understand you. Help you in what?
ANTIGONE.
Ismene, I am going to bury him. Will you come?
Bury him! You have just said the new law forbids it.

11. CREON.
She has much to learn.
The inflexible heart breaks first, the toughest iron
Cracks first, and the wildest horses bend their necks
At the pull of the smallest curb…
ANTIGONE.
Creon, what more do you want than my death?

12. Antigone vs. Ismene
Creon vs. Antigone
Creon vs. Haimon
Creon vs. Tiresias
ACTOR 1 [tyrant]: Creon ACTOR 2 [active]: Antigone, Haimon, Tiresias, Eurydice ACTOR 3 [passive] Ismene, Guard, Messenger

13. CREON.
The gods favor this corpse? Why? How had he served them? Tried to loot their temples, burn their images, yes, and the whole State, and its laws with it!

14. The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David (1787)
nomos vs physis
The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David (1787)

15. HAIMON. Everyone will tell you only what you like to hear; I have heard [the citizens of Thebes] muttering and whispering in the dark about this girl. They say no woman has ever, so unreasonably, died so shameful a death for a generous act.

16. CREON.
My voice is the one voice giving orders in this City!
HAIMON.
It is no City if it takes orders from one voice. CREON.
The State is the King!

18. ISMENE.
What do I care for life when you are dead?
ANTIGONE. Ask Creon. You’re always hanging on his opinions…
There are those who will praise you [Ismene]; I shall have honor, too.

19. I shall lie down with him [Polyneices] in death.
ANTIGONE.
I shall lie down with him [Polyneices] in death.

20. Sébastien Norblin, 1825

21. Lytras Nikiforos, 1865

22. POLYNEICES.
Antigone, listen… Don’t blush at what I shall ask you.
ANTIGONE.
All right, I blush in advance. But ask, none the less.
Is it forbidden to marry one’s sister?
Yes, most certainly; forbidden by men and by God. Why do you ask me this?
Because if I could marry you completely, I believe that I would let myself be led by you to your God.
André Gide, Oedipus (1931), translated by George Steiner

23. ANTIGONE.
You have touched it at last: that bridal bed
Unspeakable, horror of son and mother mingling
Their crime, infection of all our family!
O Oedipus, father and brother!
Your marriage strikes from the grave to murder mine.
I have been a stranger here in my own land:
All my life
The blasphemy of my birth has followed me.

25. 5th century BC

26. Antoni Brodowski, 1828

27. Per Gabriel Wickenberg, 1833

28. Jean Cocteau, 1920

29. Santiago, Chile, 2016

30. Birmingham, UK, 2017

31. Louisiana, USA, 2016

32. Skopje, Macedonia, 2015

33. Paris, France, 2016

34. Seoul, South Korea, 2015

35. Virginia, USA, 2017

36. ANTIGONE. It is my nature to join in love, not hate.

37. ANTIGONE.
My nails are broken, my fingers are bleeding, my arms are covered with the welts left by the paws of your guards—but I am a queen!

38. ANNE. Anyone who uses violence against his enemy will turn and use violence against his own people.

39. The long drawn-out wail of a siren
The long drawn-out wail of a siren. Stage-lights come up to reveal a moat of harsh white light around the cell. In it the two prisoners—John stage right and Winston stage left—mime the digging of sand. They wear the prison uniform of khaki shirt and short trousers. Their heads are shaven. It is an image of back-breaking and grotesquely futile labour. Each in turn fills a wheelbarrow and then with great effort pushes it to where the other man is digging, and empties it. As a result, the piles of sand never diminish. Their labour is interminable…

40. “Antigone addresses itself to any corner of the world where the human spirit is being oppressed, where people sit in jail because of their fight for human dignity, for freedom.” - John Kani

41. Tokyo, 2017

42. Beirut, 2014

43. “I understand why Antigone does what she does
“I understand why Antigone does what she does. If I could go to Syria and bury my brother with my own hands, I would do it.” - Hiba Sahly

44. “If the story of Antigone is told again it is because certain human, social struggles repeat themselves at intervals in history, and a complex, rich structure like the narrative of Antigone becomes—sadly—meaningful, again and again, to express the horror of the unburied dead, the costs of civil war, the wrack of atrocity, and the work of the survivors, so often women, who come after looking to bury the dead.” Jill Lane, “Antígona, and the modernity of the dead,” Modern Drama 50:4 (Spring 2008) 521–536.

45. Antigone, directed by Polly Findlay, 2012

46. Mission to kill Osama bin Laden, 2011

47. YEMISI. Your story. Sorry, you’re mistaken
YEMISI. Your story! Sorry, you’re mistaken. This is the story of Tegonni, our sister. Funny, the names sound almost the same…

48. Kalki Aporos, 2016

49. 508 BC: Cleisthenes helps transfer power from aristocrats to Athenian citizens

50. A condition for tragedy is a transition between “a sacred society and a society built by man.” Albert Camus. Selected Essays and Notebooks. Trans. Philip Thody. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.