5 November 2009: Heaney, The Burial at Thebes
Curtain Theater, UMass theater. Subscription series, No. 1.
This is Seamus Heaney’s version of Sophocles’ Antigone, freshly translated and first published, I believe, in 2005. It is a fine, sparely colloquial, flowing translation that reflects this Irish poet’s flawless ear for the sound of the spoken word and his sense of structural qualities of sentences. And this production, directed by a graduate student, Dawn Monique Williams, did the play as close to full justice as it might be possible for such an ensemble to do.
There was no attempt at Greek costume here; rather, a vivid visual metaphor was achieved by setting the play in the emerging youth culture of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The dramaturg, Jason Lites, in a program comment entitled “How do you find your voice in the midst of chaos?” Explained the attempt to meld a contemporary youth culture “and its forms of artistic expression,” including a sharply accented, rhythmic dancing, with the thematic material incorporated into Sophocles’ ancient play about the fatal results of defying human authority and, ultimately, the even greater authority of Zeus.
The chorus of ten persons, seven of them dressed in hand-me-down, rag-picker miscellaneous dress, which spoke eloquently of a hard life on the streets and a principled flouting of middle-class standards of dress, behavior, and thought, and an additional three persons dressed in more ordinary casual shirts and dresses and behaving as ordinary citizenry, together spoke Heaney’s pointed odes, usually in unison (which they had learned to do almost faultlessly), sometimes individually. The combination of these costumes, the angular, raucous music they danced to, and the choreography, with its frequent hard claps, rhythmic stomps, energetic, sudden movements of head and torso, and broad linear-tending use of the rather small performance space, surrounded in three-quarter-round bleacher seating, set a clear, stark image of a group of young people in a somewhat rebellious but also puzzled and querulous frame of mind. Heaney understands the dramatic, dynamic interplay that occurs in Sophocles’ play between the odes of the chorus and the episodes of action. At the same time he blends the edges of transitions between the two forms so that the chorus in this production has more of an “inside” role, not only commenting but actually to some degree participating in the action, and becoming a kind of composite character in its own right. The director, much to her credit (and it would appear she gets a second credit also for choreography, since no one else is credited with that task and there are only credits in the program for an assistant and additional choreographer), has sensed this particular integrative purpose (at least, as I perceive it) and directed movement and dialogue accordingly. The amount of attention given to the part of the chorus in this production was clear and extremely successful. One might say “de