Antigone

About the performance

The production is 1 hour and 50 minutes long.

The myth of Antigone, this upstanding and brave rebel, has since antiquity addressed, in many shapes, the fundamental question of the antagonism between the unwritten human laws and the code of the state, between the ethics and the law. At the same time, it has meticulously questioned the functioning of the society and the individual’s place in it. This was the position from which Dominik Smole, one of the most important voices in Slovenian drama writing, looked into the classical myth in his 1960 poetic drama Antigone. Through a story about the time immediately after the end of a destructive war he wrote a contemporary tragedy about the disintegration of all ethics and law, and above all, the moral disintegration of contemporary society and humanity. Unlike in Sophocles’ version, Smole’s Antigone no longer rebels against the authoritative leader; the essence of her activities is instead following her consciousness, a system of values which she firmly and uncompromisingly believes –regardless of the appeals of her nearest, the people’s rumours or the opinion of the ruler. Antigone is guided not by a clash or a confrontation but by her firm backbone in realising her ideals. In Smole’s play, Antigone is physically absent, and the Theban community merely observes her actions, which helps the author highlight the problem of social and political pragmatism, opportunism, and apathy. And with this – no less radically – he also addresses our time.

"Antigone from Nova Gorica lets the calm, sharp, even cynical image of the world after the war, when a new world with new ethics and new idols is being created, speak to the full, without updating the text, while revealing the dullness of the peace with a suggestive visual image and the precise acting of all and the compromise that apparent social appeasement requires. At the same time, she offered the hope that the new generation will be able to read classic dramatic texts and perform them properly, as well as the prospect that members of this generation will take on Paž’s resistance in exposing anomalies." Matej Bogataj, Sodobnost, 2023

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