'Antigone' revolves around the notion of war and its aftermath - which makes it particularly relevant for the Belfast Festival at Queen's
THE DRAMATIC setting and context could not be more apposite for a Belfast premiere. A long war has ended, but with peace comes conflict.
Writer/director Owen McCafferty sums up the defining question that lies at the core of Sophocles's Antigone. "How do you treat your enemy in victory?" he asks. "It's a question that goes right to the heart of humanity. You know a society by the way it treats the dead of its enemy. After a conflict, we celebrate those on our side who have been lost. It's always much harder to acknowledge the dead of the other side and, with good grace, allow your enemy to do likewise."
McCafferty's new version of the play, which he is also directing for Prime Cut, will be premiered during the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen's and is one of the most eagerly awaited highlights of its two-week programme which starts tonight.
Over the past four years, he has built up a strong artistic relationship with the company and, emerging for a brief break from the rehearsal room, he is clearly buoyed up at the prospect of seeing this epic production go on stage in a week's time.
"I started to write this play three or four years ago as a workshop piece for the National Theatre Studio in London. Afterwards, I got very caught up in it and wanted to finish it. So I wrote another draft, which hung in the air for a while. Prime Cut heard about it and asked me to do it. Because of the relationship I have with the company and their plans to stage more large-scale shows, it was appealing.
"They did my play Scenes from the Big Picturelast year with a cast of 21. This production has a cast of 13, which is necessary to recreate the epic notion of the play. These days, stuff on this scale is something you don't often have the chance to do, which is unfortunate."
McCafferty is the latest in a line of distinguished Northern writers who have taken up the daunting challenge of adapting this mighty tragedy to the modern stage. In 1985, Field Day commissioned Tom Paulin to write The Riot Actand in 2004, Seamus Heaney wrote a verse translation entitled The Burial at Thebes, to commemorate the centenary of the Abbey Theatre. After its UK premiere, a critic for one of the London broadsheets was moved to muse on whether it was the best play ever written.
"He was not talking about Heaney's version, but about the original," says McCafferty. "And while I might not necessarily agree, I can understand why he would ask that question. It is a magnificent play. The Greeks are interested in debate, not morality. What matters is the choice you make in a certain set of circumstances. There is an inevitability about that debate and you get caught up in the moment. There is no fat on this play at all. It simply moves on to the next issue and the effect is epic and theatrical.
"In a modern play, you would plot the story arc and work it all out carefully. These plays only deal with the people who are on the stage at the time. In contemporary plays, we see the drama in terms of morality. We are not interested in whether people are making the right choices. That does not concern us. But in Greek tragedy, the choice is crucial."
IT PROVES SOMETHING of a struggle for the famously vague and laconic McCafferty to cast his mind back, on request, to his first encounter with Greek drama, when he was a philosophy student in Belfast in the early 1980s.
"I can barely remember last week, leave alone 20-odd years ago," he admits. "For my final-year thesis, I wrote a duologue between two modern philosophers, which was based on my reading of Plato. Now I can't recall the detail, but the piece was political. I suppose in a way it was my first play. Before I became a playwright I read the Theban trilogy and was struck by its epic quality. It's on the same scale as Shakespeare but more accessible and, in some ways, more appealing.
"People tend to be frightened of Shakespeare, they feel that you have to be an expert to get to grips with him. Shakespeare is untouchable. That's absolutely not the case with the Greek plays.
"There is clearly a rationale about doing this play in Belfast at this time. It revolves around the notion of war and conflict and the aftermath. But, really, it's a play for all times and all places. It is always going to be relevant - at no point in the history of man has there not been conflict.
"It is the ultimate post-conflict play. I was going to call it Creonbecause I wanted to delve a bit deeper into that character. Antigoneis always seen as a clash between the good guy and the bad guy, with Creon always painted as the bad guy. I thought it would do no harm if people saw him as being pragmatic, instead of viewing the clash with Antigone as just a black-and-white issue.
"I wanted to portray him as doing what he did for the good of the city. His speech before the proclamation is difficult to fault. You must unite against your enemies to deliver the city. There are no lies, no deceit. He says plainly what he is going to do, so there should be no surprise when he does it. That's the engine that moves the play forward."
Unlike his work on previous adaptations, McCafferty says that this time he is not writing in the Belfast vernacular. He is, however, attempting to put a modern spin on a classic text. "The way we are trying to do it is to make it more of a play. The way the Greeks staged these plays, they became spectacles, viewed from afar. I am hoping that this will allow the audience to engage with the action as it is happening. I haven't changed the setting, but we are creating a certain modernity for a present-day audience.
"While new plays are incredibly important, I get a tremendous buzz from taking on an adaptation. You are not starting from a blank page and struggling for an eternity to get the structure and the unfolding story.
"When you are dealing with a play like this, you are not going to tamper with it. I haven't changed anything of its internal structure and dynamic. The great pleasure is in working with the words. There is no rule book.
"But it is a great feeling to make a link, a direct connection, with the writer. I am aware, as I sit down to write, that thousands of years ago there was a playwright, called Sophocles, who was working on the same play.
"Your duty is towards him, to delivering what the play is about, what it really means, though I must admit that whenever I am asked to write an adaptation, my first reaction is 'why not do the original?'."
MCCAFFERTY'S FIRST TILT at adaptation was a highly-praised version of Eugene Ionescu's comedy-of-the absurd The Chairsfor Tinderbox. It was followed by a powerful double-handed version of JP Miller's Days of Wine and Rosesfor the Donmar Warehouse in London. He did not hesitate when asked to take on what had long been one of his own favourite films about a couple's descent into the hell of alcoholism.
"I knew that movie, I knew that story," he says. "I felt I could deliver it. Miller had died just a few years before what was the first stage presentation of his story. His wife and daughter came over from the States to see it. It was a strange experience. Part of me couldn't be interested in the notion of whether they would approve or not, because I had to write a play. But another part of me wanted them to recognise it as connected to Days of Wine and Roses, as their husband or father had told the story. His wife came up to me afterwards and hugged me. She was very pleased. And so was I.
"The same kind of thing applies with Antigone. At the forefront of my mind is that if Sophocles came to see this show in Belfast, he would know it as his own."
Antigonepreviews on Oct 23 and runs at the Waterfront Studio until Nov 1.
www.belfastfestival.com
