Antigone
Opening Night: September 24, 2015
Closing: October 4, 2015
Theater: BAM Harvey Theater
Should love or law guarantee the dignity of the dead? With unvarnished intensity, Oscar-winning actor Juliette Binoche, Olivier-winning director Ivo van Hove, and poet and MacArthur fellow Anne Carson—offering a new colloquial translation—pare Sophokles’ great question to the tragic bone. In Thebes, Antigone has refuted King Kreon’s (Patrick O’Kane) order: that her traitorous brother’s body be left to rot outside the city gates. Vast monochrome videoscapes of sun and moon, sand and snow provide the backdrop to Van Hove’s taut, unsentimental account of a woman who, as removed from life as she is from death, ends up taking both into her own hands.
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September 27, 2015
A merciless sun blazes over Thebes in Ivo van Hove’s doom-steeped production of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” which opened on Sunday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a highly distraught Juliette Binoche in the title role. As conceived by the set and lighting designer Jan Versweyveld, this ferocious orb dominates the back wall of the stage at the Harvey Theater like an all-seeing eye of fire, one that judges and withers everything it surveys. You get the feeling that it’s not just the ill-fated souls of ancient Greece that this sun looks upon. It’s staring straight into the audience as well. That stately drumbeat that we hear every so often is marking the pace of everybody’s death march. Well, you didn’t exactly expect an evening of feel-good forgiveness, did you? Greek tragedy — which is much in vogue these days on both sides of the Atlantic — has always been take-no-prisoners theater.
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