Nottingham Playhouse Theatre Company opens a new season with its acclaimed staging of THE BURIAL AT THEBES. Given its UK premiere at the Playhouse in November 2005, this adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone by Nobel prizewinner Seamus Heaney grants the tragic heroine of antiquity a compelling 21st century voice. Director Lucy Pitman-Wallace has reunited key collaborators to reimagine her original production, which garnered five-star reviews in the national press. The new cast is led by Abby Ford as Antigone and Paul Bentall as Creon. With the University of Nottingham as its sponsor, THE BURIAL AT THEBES returns to Nottingham Playhouse from Friday 31 August to Saturday 15 September (Box Office: 0115 941 9419 or www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk) before touring to the Barbican Pit and Oxford Playhouse.
The daughter of Oedipus, Antigone is truly a child of tragedy. The crown of Thebes has now passed to Creon, her uncle, following a bitter civil war which leaves Antigone’s brothers dead at one another’s hands. Creon decrees that one, Eteocles, should be buried with honour, while the other, Polyneices, should go unburied as a traitor to the City.
Anguished and headstrong, Antigone refuses to accept a law that defies the rule of the gods. Autocratic and unbending, Creon will brook no challenge to his authority – even from the niece who is set to marry his son Haemon. For Antigone the choice is stark: obey Creon and offend the gods, or follow her heart and condemn an accursed family to fresh bloodshed.
Over 2500 years old, the story of Antigone finds renewed resonance in every age with its timeless confrontation between the individual and the State; youth and experience; divine law and human. Sophocles’ great tragedy presents on one hand a young person driven to acts of extremity by a burning sense of righteousness; on the other, a new leader propelled into the political spotlight after years waiting in the shadows. Its contemporary qualities are unmistakable. The play even gives rise to the "Creon test", which measures whether a political leader’s integrity can survive when he comes to power. The only modern figure to pass the test is said to be Nelson Mandela, who himself famously played Creon while imprisoned on Robben Island.
Originally commissioned to mark the centenary of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Seamus Heaney’s compelling adaptation of Antigone took additional inspiration from President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. THE BURIAL AT THEBES resists the limitations of allegory but convincingly unites the classic and modern aspects of the tale, employing a spare, muscular voice which at the same time has an epic and lyrical quality. Drawing variously on the rhythms of Irish laments, Shakespearean blank verse and Anglo-Saxon poetry, Heaney’s verse lends different weight to different characters, always retaining its accessibility and emotional power.
Director Lucy Pitman-Wallace’s staging likewise balances the classical and the contemporary. Dressed in simple robes, the Chorus comes together to intone its great fatalistic speeches, with Composer/Musical Director Mick Sands contributing as before a timeless accompaniment of rhythm and keening. Cast members step in and out of the throng to assume their individual roles. Also returning to help reconceive the production for this tour is Designer Jessica Curtis, who encloses the action within the claustrophobic confines of a semicircular city wall, suggested in part by the shape of classical amphitheatres, but almost post-industrial in its texture.
Born in County Derry, Northern Ireland in 1939, Seamus Heaney has gained worldwide recognition as a poet, his many works including the collections North, Station Island and The Spirit Level as well as an acclaimed translation of Beowulf. He is also a man of the theatre, and his long involvement with Brian Friel’s theatre company Field Day culminated in an earlier adaptation from Sophocles, The Cure at Troy, based in this instance on Philoctetes. Heaney has held several prestigious academic posts, including Boyston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Lucy Pitman-Wallace earned a Theatrical Management Association (TMA) award nomination as Best Director for her original staging of THE BURIAL AT THEBES at Nottingham Playhouse. A former Associate Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), her directing credits include Eastward Ho!, which was performed as part of the RSC Swan Season, winning the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement of the Year 2003. She directed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the RSC at Sadler’s Wells, and has directed Waiting for Godot and Gregory Burke’s Unsecured at the National Theatre. Her other work includes: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Blue Room at York Theatre Royal; The Duchess of Malfi, As You Like It and the current Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme; numerous plays as Artistic Director of Three Legged Theatre; and three outdoor touring productions for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, including this summer’s all-male Romeo & Juliet.
The cast of THE BURIAL AT THEBES includes Paul Bentall (Creon), Abby Ford (Antigone), Sian Clifford (Ismene), Sam Swainsbury (Haemon), David Acton, Cymon Allen, David Hobbs and Joan Moon. David Hobbs and Joan Moon both return from the original production, while David Acton will be familiar to Playhouse audiences as Dr Görtler in the recent production of J.B. Priestley’s I Have Been Here Before.
Playing Antigone is Abby Ford, who is reunited with Lucy Pitman-Wallace after playing Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At the National, she has taken key roles in the acclaimed Coram Boy and Nicholas Hytner’s production of Man of Mode. She recently appeared in Closer (Royal & Derngate Theatres, Northampton).
Paul Bentall brings vast stage experience to the role of Creon, with numerous appearances at the National Theatre and with the RSC to his name. His recent credits include You Never Can Tell, Habeas Corpus and Measure for Measure, all directed by Peter Hall; he has previously worked with Lucy Pitman-Wallace on Eastward Ho!
Lucy Pitman-Wallace has also reunited several frequent collaborators in her creative team, which includes Designer Jessica Curtis, Composer/MD Mick Sands, Lighting Designer Jenny Kagan, Movement Director Jackie Matthews, and Voice Coach Catherine Weate. Zoë Waterman, winner of the New Wimbledon Theatre’s Emerging Director Award 2006, returns as Assistant Director.
-ends-
Press Night: Nottingham Playhouse, Tuesday 4 September at 8.00pm
TOUR SCHEDULE:
The Barbican, London: Tuesday 18 September – Saturday 29 September, presented in The Pit (Box Office: 0845 120 7550)
Oxford Playhouse: Tuesday 9 – Saturday 13 October (Box Office: 01865 305 305)
