Book 1 Part 4
Preparing for A150 before the course starts: The Island
From Book 3, Cultural Encounters, Chapter 6 Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, Resources, pp.221-2.
A Greek tragedy for our times
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
overreaching. 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 Nobel 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.’
[...]
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. [...]
Source: Eileen Battersby (2004) ‘A Greek tragedy for our times’, The Irish Times, 3 April (City Edition; Weekend), p. 55.
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From Book 3, Cultural Encounters, Chapter 6 Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, Resources, p.241.
Beginning to hope
Our amateur drama society made its yearly offering at
Christmas. My thespian career, which had lain dormant since I played
John Wilkes Booth while at Fort Hare, had a modest revival on Robben
Island. Our productions were what might now be called minimalist: no
stage, no scenery, no costumes. All we had was the text of the play.
I performed in only a few dramas, but I had one memorable role: that of Creon, the king of Thebes, in Sophocles’ Antigone.
I had read some of the classic Greek plays in prison, and found them
enormously elevating. What I took out of them was that character was
measured by facing up to difficult situations and that a hero was a man
who would not break down even under the most trying circumstances.
When Antigone was chosen as the play I
volunteered my services, and was asked to play Creon, an elderly king
fighting a civil war over the throne of his beloved city-state. At the
outset, Creon is sincere and patriotic, and there is wisdom in his early
speeches when he suggests that experience is the foundation of
leadership and that obligations to the people take precedence over
loyalty to an individual.
| Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgement, not till he’s shown his colours, ruling the people, making laws. Experience, there’s the test. |
||
But Creon deals with his enemies mercilessly. He has decreed
that the body of Polynices, Antigone’s brother, who had rebelled against
the city, does not deserve a proper burial. Antigone rebels, on the
grounds that there is a higher law than that of the state. Creon will
not listen to Antigone, neither does he listen to anyone but his own
inner demons. His inflexibility and blindness ill become a leader, for a
leader must temper justice with mercy. It was Antigone who symbolized
our struggle; she was, in her own way, a freedom fighter, for she defied
the law on the ground that it was unjust.
Source: Nelson Mandela (1994) Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, London, Abacus, pp. 540–1.
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