The scenography shall be on vertical lines. The agora in the center, small, and around it steps which go up as if carved out from the rock of both hills. On top of one of them, there is the temple’s colonnade — just columns which get further away according to perspective — and on top of the other the palace’s colonnade. The stairways which lead to the temple open up radially with geometrical order, while those of the palace criss-cross chaotically, as if built by chance. All scenic action shall develop in vertical lines, going up and down. The cameras, high and low, shall accentuate the diagonals of the movement.
The whole set shall be colored, even the ground, in red, orange and ochre; the columns shall also be colored in red and orange, as the Greeks did. The actors must feel the color, all the red. It doesn’t matter that it won’t register in the video; it’s the actors who will transmit it to the spectator, for they must recite ‘in red’.
They used to put on their buskins, acted with masks, and with three actors covered all the roles. We know nothing of their pronunciation, of the voices that exited their masks, the meanings of the rough and smooth breathings, or of the monody the chorus sang in the Dionysian festivals. To believe one can do Greek theater in the manner of the Greeks is, at the very least, foolish.
Copeau said: ‘Le classique, c’est nous’ [‘The classic is us’]. Eternal value of the classic, which can adhere and remain valid through time and space. Antigone could be recited by blacks in a forest and indeed, ‘le classique, c’est nous’. It is thus necessary to annihilate the Chorus and turn it into a character (as it already is in spirit): four characters, two warriors and two Theban noblemen. The text divided like a dialogue. From Aeschylus to Sophocles the chorus changed significantly, so we’re allowed to humanize it by identifying it with individual characters.
The spectator won’t be seated in semi-circular terraces among a crowd possessed by Dionysus, but alone (or almost) in front of a box of images.
The television camera, the mediator, shall dance to the rhythm of the god, while the text shall be ever more arcane, secret, intimate. Sophocles’ text will no longer be sung, but staged according to the truth, sincerity, and validity of the emotion. We must not ‘transmit’, but ‘communicate’, and therefore: an enormous silent charge, an immense motionless tension.
If so, it will be possible to unleash Creon’s final movement and scream. And to feel the infinite red surrounding Antigone.
Antigone is like a sunbeam, a beam emitted from the ground where she lays her feet. She sees farther than the others and she sees into the others, and because of that her gaze shall have no blinks, and she will stare high above her interlocutors. In the rare moments when her eyes stare at them, it will be dazzling, and the others shall look down to the earth instead. Heteronomy and autonomy of Antigone’s moral law — a continuous alternation of both movements (development).
The concept of guilt which weights over Antigone — guilt of her parents — incest. Antigone’s life before the death of her brothers explains her immense thirst for an absolute value, external to contingent human relations, which now impels her towards sacrifice. The woman is wholly equalled to the man as a representative of humanity.
Fate isn’t a fact external to man, imposed upon man; it grows within man himself, out of man himself, and determines events through man's voluntary actions: thus man participates in divinity.
Antigone is a mirror: the mirror of her own myth. To understand the drama one must see it mirrored by Antigone, and thus each character gains its measure and one discovers that the Messenger is perhaps the most elevated voice after Antigone’s.
During the trial, Antigone will be placed up high, almost on top of a pedestal in front of the temple. Creon exits the palace and walks down the staircase, accusing her, then he goes on in the agora, low, crushed by her, tall, vertical. He’ll go up the stairs of the temple (perhaps twice) to put himself face to face with Antigone, but he won’t be able to resist and he’ll come down, almost fleeing, returning to the agora. When he’s close to her he almost forgets how to speak, and regains his vigor once he is far away.
Antigone does not wish to recognize any guilt, but only misfortunes dealt by the gods. Antigone does not go toward death, she descends into it, she submerges herself as if in water. The last image of her shall descend and disappear from the bottom of the frame.
Antigone dies by the strength of her convictions, Ismene dies for love, by her faith in her sister. Two forms of sanctity. ‘Sophocles’ religiousness’, writes Enzo Paci, ‘tends to overcome civic divinity towards an universalistic religion’ (Eleusinian Mysteries — Demeter). The harmony between human action and divine action is realized when human action expresses a deeper and higher order; an order that is not ‘written’, but ‘revealed’.
Sophocles’ dramaturgy is that of the movements of the soul: it is interior, profound, almost secret.
Creon lives according to a mental schema built by himself, and he forces his world to fit into this schema, to accept it. But how much can one fool oneself?
The great shadow of Oedipus is always there, in the palace’s background.
Creon has an imprecise awareness of the ruin toward which he runs, and because of that, in him there prevails wrath, rage, accusation. In front of his own dead son, the Creon who had constructed himself so willingly and so relentlessly shatters into pieces. No longer a mind, a thought, a law, but a lump of suffering, something that shoots around aimlessly, that screams desperately against the insurmountable barriers of desperation. In the epilogue, it is a continuous fall, then an attempt at standing up and falling again towards the body of the dead son (a body that must never be seen and that shall be covered by a piece of red cloth, as red as the surrounding set). In the final image, far away, seen from above, Creon falls for the last time and there remain the two bodies, lying in the completely empty agora. It will be thus necessary to excise the Chorus’ last line.
The evil we unknowingly commit: we are as responsible as Oedipus, who by the doors of Thebes discovers himself and his incest. The shadow of the great Oedipus would perhaps loom over the grounded Creon.
Aristotle said that the characters of ancient tragedy do not yet speak rhetorically, but politically. This is valid in part for Creon and in part for Antigone.
Eteocles and Polynices. Alternating the throne one year each. Creon condemns Polynices only for the fact that he fought against Thebes, without considering the reasons which impelled him to this combat. His sentence is extremely grave, it is eternal, to the unburied it is not permitted to enter the world of those below. Let us remember Homer — those who died in battle, the rescue of the dead in order to bury them.
Tiresias. Robust, of average height, not too old, no beard, no hair, with a strong jaw and two immense eyes that ‘see’. He does not scream but he talks with extreme tension. When he says what he sees, and when he threatens, his eyes are filled with tears. How could he not cry, seeing and knowing the extreme disgraces that loom over the Labdacids? It’s not a cry of weakness, it’s not even crying, just tears in his eyes, while Tiresias threatens and accuses. In it, there shall remain all his virile strength and the presence within him of the God, even with the tears.
In Tiresias there is the pain and desperation which give him his stature. When he moves and approaches Creon, he raises his hand and moves it slowly, open, in the air, advancing while searching for the king. It is the hand that chases, the open hand that does not threaten but which follows him as if it could see and that when reaches him grabs him. When the hand touches him Creon stops, but as soon as he is free he distances himself from it and the hand starts following him again.
During his presages, Tiresias is sitting and the king is standing almost behind him. Alternate perpendicular dolly-ins which go up to an extreme close-up of Tiresias, and while the dolly continues the camera lets go of the prophet and falls upon the king. After the cut, the same camera movement but perpendicular, and so on, each prophecy being received by the same movement.
The Guard is a comical character. A character lacking in weight, from the satyr play. For the first time in a Greek tragedy, there appears a comical character, and he does not disturb the tragic atmosphere at all; rather, his description of the burial, delivered with fearful jests and described by an ignorant boor, acquires a poetic flavor, a greatness and a wholeness that the naked description of the facts would not have. The Guard shall be small and skinny. He shows up without a helmet and he shall carry his shield on his back, a big round shield with scratch marks, under which will appear his miserable little legs, while his head will remain almost entirely covered by the shield. He should evoke an insect, one of those insects with a lumpish body contrasted by slender little legs; one should think that if he fell on his back he wouldn’t know how to turn and would remain on his shield shaking his legs in vain. When he is to say his aside he’ll approach the camera up to an extreme close-up and, staring at the lens, that is, the spectator, he’ll say his lines almost winking in complicity with the spectator himself, somewhere between cunning and wise. Whether he’s approaching or moving away to go back to the scene, his movement shall be very fast, a lightning flash.
In his talk with the king, he displays a mix of respect and insolence, but remains always very fearful, almost ready to escape if the king were to attack him. He is respectful but impertinent. After Antigone’s arrest, in his description of the events the Guard uses an onomatopoeic speech. When he describes the unforeseen hurricane, he waves his arms, blows and howls like the wind, finishing his description with the thunder bouncing from valley to valley. When he describes the appearance of Antigone who ‘squealed mournfully like an inconsolable bird who finds its nest empty’ he must say his lines in a falsetto, in a high pitch, similar to the bird which cries mournfully. And when narrating the burial, he gets agitated and goes round and round around the king and, in the end, he jumps to the farthest camera, says his final aside and disappears with a grimace. The cut leads us to Antigone standing on the podium, and a close-up soon after. There must be no separation between the comic’s jokes and the protagonist of the tragedy.
Haemon: in front of him, his father Creon puts on the mask under which he dissimulates his previous profanations. One does not become a father on the day of a birth, but slowly, effortfully, with pain and suffering, with unforeseen leaps and long periods of deafness of the soul, across time, penetrating and letting oneself be penetrated by another soul. And yet, Haemon calls Creon his father. Because of this name of ‘father’, his accusations and the violent clash in the dialogue shall remain restrained, never screamed however intense or charged they may be. The last line is almost a desperate whisper.
Haemon’s death. Here, the fatherhood which Creon hadn’t obtained in the many years during which his child made himself a man invades him all at once — suddenly he realizes he’s lost his son twice, and that it’s his fault, and now he lets himself be filled by pain, or rather, be taken away by it as if by a waterfall. It is only in his pain, or even in the complete annihilation of his worldly happiness, that Sophocles’ tragic character elevates himself to true human greatness. In his pain, Creon finally conquers himself.
The Messenger describes Haemon’s death. His words aren’t that of a witness narrating, but of a participant of the tragedy itself. I believe the actor who plays Haemon should reappear in the clothes of the Messenger, and he must be this second Haemon who contemplates his own death: describing the pale Antigone in the tomb, Haemon’s desperation, the mad gesture which leads him to try to kill his father and then to turn the weapon against himself, and his own death holding on to the virgin Antigone who bathes in his blood.
If it is Haemon himself who narrates, then we have the ‘repetition’ after the ‘fracture’: everything that happened happens again, but now the demons have been warded off, have been satisfied.
Since Copeau said ‘le classique, c’est nous’, then we can certainly reencounter Haemon under the clothes of the Messenger.
There is no more divine intervention in Antigone — the Deus ex machina. The only ‘machine’ that remains is the eccyclema to allow us to see the dead Eurydice inside the palace. I don’t believe the dead should be seen. Death is present in the whole epilogue because the dead are inside Creon. We must see the dead Eurydice in Creon’s eyes.
Wishing to represent the characters by graphical signs, geometry thus suggests:
Antigone is a straight line.
Ismene is a triangle.
Creon is a hexagon that in the epilogue is shattered and disperses into triangles. Let us remember his final scream: ‘All that is mine wobbles, oblique. All my life falls under the crushing fate which struck me in the forehead.’
Haemon is two inverted triangles superimposed.
Tiresias is a square with one side open, missing one side.
The Messenger is a circle.
The Chorus are the four radii of a circumference.
The music must be electronic. For Sophocles, an abstract and pure sound is required, I mean without secondary vibrations. A music out of time, classical, but with sounds of an extreme modernity. The music, presented in the beginning of the chorus sections, must remind the spectator of the presence of the divine, while the story’s desperate and deep humanity makes us forget it. We must always remind the spectator of the sacredness of Greek theater.
‘Antigone’, in Ai poeti non si spara: Vittorio Cottafavi tra cinema e televisione (Edizione Cineteca di Bologna, 2010), pp. 155–157. Originally published in French as ‘Notes pour la mise
en scène d’Antigone de Sophocle’ in Présence du cinéma, 9, December 1962, pp. 33–40. Subsequently published in Italian as ‘Antigone’ in Televisione, 1, April 1964., 1, April 1964.
Antigone (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1958)