HOW AN ANCIENT PLAY STILL RESONATES TODAY
New production of Sophocles’ Antigone changes life of Montreal’s Will Aitken
Timing can be everything. One day in the winter of 2015, Will Aitken got a call from eminent Montreal poet and longtime friend Anne Carson. Her translation of the Greek tragedian Sophocles’ Antigone was about to be mounted in a theatrical production directed by Ivo Van Hove and starring Juliette Binoche.
Would Aitken be interested in coming along as an observer at the final rehearsals and world première in Luxembourg?
Aitken didn’t need any armtwisting. Recently retired from teaching film studies at Dawson College, and enjoying his new leisure, he was nonetheless not far removed from a period of professional doldrums: two attempted follow-ups to his last published novel, 2001’s Realia, had met across-the-board rejection from publishers. “It created a crisis of identity for me,” said the youthful 69-year-old in his Plateau loft last week. “I had defined myself as a novelist, so now that I was clearly not going to get published, what would I do? I had some dark years.”
The what-to-do problem was partly solved by a critically lauded monograph on Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice. Still, this newly proffered opportunity to witness a high-level creative process was unique and impossible to resist. The result, written in a yearlong burst, is Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo Van Hove and the Art of Resistance (University of Regina Press, 218 pp, $24.95).
Combining personal confessional, interwoven interviews with the principals (the portrait that emerges of Binoche is especially illuminating) and a layperson’s critical take on philosophical and literary responses to Antigone, it’s a book that extends and deepens our engagement with an ancient work that can appear uncannily contemporary.
Antigone — for those who may not have read it and for the many whose memory of their high school and university course lists may be fading — is the story of the titular teenage girl’s insistence on going against her uncle’s decree and giving her deceased soldier
brother a proper burial; for her pains, she is entombed alive.
“What crystallizes the play for me is that she’s the first female rebel,” Aitken said. “She stands up to a power structure that finds the mere fact of her standing up so threatening. My personal entry point was her being an angry teenager, lashing out at the man who has authority over her. That connected to my childhood (Aitken grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana) and the way I felt as a gay adolescent toward my father, who was an authoritarian man. It was amazing how, 50 years after the fact, the play made me feel things I hadn’t felt since then.”
As he stresses in the book, there’s a risk in making too much of the identification modern audiences might feel with Antigone.
“It can feel very contemporary, especially in Anne’s translation, which is remarkable partly because it makes no attempt to sound like ancient Greek, to strain toward antiquity. The ancient Greeks weren’t speaking ‘ancient Greek,’ to them it was a contemporary idiom. But we also have to bear in mind that Athens 2,500 years ago was a place almost unfathomably different from ours. For example, a friend was telling me that a new school of thought on Antigone — something I hadn’t even thought of — is that she’s just a male construct. She was created for a male audience, because the only women allowed to see drama at the time were prostitutes and courtesans. And of course, she would have been played by a man.”
One thing Aitken didn’t anticipate was the visceral emotional effect the staging would have on him, a reaction that hit immediately afterward, on a supposed R & R trip to Amsterdam.
“I didn’t see it coming at all,” he said of the depression that descended on him and lasted six months. “I didn’t even realize at first that it was the play setting me off. I was just wondering, ‘Why do I feel so weird and uncomfortable in this city I know so well?’ Here I was so excited at being invited to watch this process, suddenly experiencing something different in kind and intensity from anything I’d known. Depression was not a new thing for me, nor, I suspect, is it new for most writers. There are good reasons to be depressed. But to have it come from a work of art completely ambushed me. Lots of great literature makes you sad and incites all kinds of powerful emotions but the final effect is incredibly positive. But this was something else entirely.”
Aitken’s frank account of his depression, and of grappling with questions as elemental as ‘What is great art for?’ is the heart of the new book, but there’s a lot more to it, from observations on the 51-year-old Binoche playing a teenager (“She was so great that it didn’t even occur to me that it was odd. And you know, we forget that this is not a new thing. Sarah Bernhardt played Juliet in her seventies, with a wooden leg”) to his fearlessness in diving into an area outside his reading wheelhouse. “Go to the McGill Library and you’ll see shelves upon shelves on Antigone,” he said. “It’s the second-most-written-about Greek tragedy after Oedipus. I wanted to examine how great minds had thought about her and identified with her — Hegel, Kierkegaard, Virginia Woolf, Judith Butler.”
As Aitken acknowledges, it’s undeniable that readers coming anew to Antigone, and to his book, will be seeing it through a lens significantly different than it would have been even as recently as two years ago.
“Definitely. A revolution is happening in North America and Europe — and at Concordia — at a pace we couldn’t have predicted even a year ago. Since Trump it has only intensified. Resistance has snowballed.”
So what would he say to a skeptic asking about the relevance of a book about an ancient play? “I’d say Antigone is a striking example of the power of people speaking to power. Antigone is standing out from the crowd and saying ‘This is wrong.’ She’s a lesson. You have to speak up.”