Antigone

Seven years after her production of «Oedipus», the Slovenian director Mateja Koležnik now brings the next instalment of the Theban myths to the Resi stage: both a political thriller and an epic family drama. Oedipus’s sons are already dead when the story begins but it is they who set it in motion: while fighting over the throne, they killed each other in a duel. Their uncle Creon has now taken over as Regent and wishes for happier times in the house of the tragically blinded Oedipus and in a country that has suffered from war and pestilence.  He forbids that the aggressor Polynices be buried, at which his sister Antigone rebels and decides she would rather die than accept this royal command. What forces are in conflict here? The power of the state against religious customs, strictly rational orders against protesting emotions, an old man against a young woman? The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek views the chorus, the people, as a third force in the play and uses this to show how distant the quarrel in the royal palace is from social reality.  Mateja Koležnik combines Sophocles’s play with this contemporary reading and re-interprets the myth for a time in which personal and social benefit are strictly weighed against each other in new ways.

«I know that in the theatre it’s important to distinguish between right and wrong, to decide which character’s side you’re on. In ‹Antigone› the rights of the individual, based on one’s own family and one’s own beliefs, stand opposed to the rights of the state and its decrees. When I read the play today, I think that they are both wrong and that they aren’t even prepared to listen to each other. This is why I want to tell the story from both perspectives.» Mateja Koležnik