Feminist psychoanalytical critics who say that she is the answer to freud's selection of edipus. They said, what if freud had selected antigone, a strang girl born of a not hetronormative relationship between her parents? You know, she's been very much identified by l g b t c plus communities as a helpful way into psychoanalysis. And very many people encounter antigone now through the works of lus irigare and judith butler. It lays out the two sides with such complexity and and with such economy, and wi l get you by the throat from about the third line in a short, very short play
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what is reputedly the most performed of all Greek tragedies. Antigone, by Sophocles (c496-c406 BC), is powerfully ambiguous, inviting the audience to reassess its values constantly before the climax of the play resolves the plot if not the issues. Antigone is barely a teenager and is prepared to defy her uncle Creon, the new king of Thebes, who has decreed that nobody should bury the body of her brother, a traitor, on pain of death. This sets up a conflict between generations, between the state and the individual, uncle and niece, autocracy and pluralism, and it releases an enormous tragic energy that brings sudden death to Antigone, her fiance Haemon who is also Creon's son, and to Creon's wife Eurydice, while Creon himself is condemned to a living death of grief.
With
Edith Hall
Professor of Classics at Durham University
Oliver Taplin
Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Oxford
And
Lyndsay Coo
Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek Language and Literature at the University of Bristol
Producer: Simon Tillotson