Will Aitken - Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance

2018 Will Aitken

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Cover and text design: Duncan Campbell, University of Regina Press

Copy editor: Alex Schultz

Proofreader: Kristine Douaud

Cover photo: Bust of a Lagid Queen as Isis: Cleopatra II or III. Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons. Used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Aitken, Will, author

Antigone undone : Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the art of resistance / Will Aitken.

(The Regina collection) Includes bibliographical references.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-88977-521-3 (hardcover). - ISBN 978-0-88977-522-0 ( PDF ). - ISBN 978-0-88977-523-7 ( HTML )

1. Sophocles. Antigone. 2. Sophocles - Criticism and interpretation. 3. Sophocles - Appreciation. 4. Sophocles - Influence. 5. Binoche, Juliette, 1964- - Interviews. 6. Carson, Anne, 1950- - Interviews. 7. Hove, Ivo van, 1958- - Interviews. 8. Greek drama (Tragedy) - History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Regina collection

PA4413.A7A38 2018 882'.01 C2017-906780-X C2017-906781-8

Saskatchewan, Canada, S4S 0A2 tel: (306) 585-4758 fax: (306) 585-4699 web: www.uofrpress.ca

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We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. / Nous reconnaissons lappui financier du gouvernement du Canada. This publication was made possible with support from Creative Saskatchewans Creative Industries Production Grant Program.

for Susanne Greenhalgh

I shall never forget the Antigone . I saw it at Cambridge years ago, and its haunted me ever since. Dont you think its quite the most modern thing you ever saw?

Mrs. Dalloway, in Virginia Woolfs The Voyage Out

In the winter of 2015, Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson and her husband and collaborator, Robert Currie, invited me to travel to Luxembourg to witness the rehearsals for and the premiere of Annes translation of Sophokless tragedy Antigone , with Juliette Binoche in the title role and Ivo van Hove directing.

Watching the play five times during those three days in Luxembourg had an unanticipated and devastating effect on me. Its an unusual thing, to be ambushed by a 2,500-year-old play. In Antigone , a teenage Theban princess insists on burying her brother, killed in battle. Her uncle, Kreon, the king, says her brother was a traitor to the state and that his body must rot in the sun for all to see. Antigone sneaks out into the night to fling dirt on the body. For this, Kreon has her walled up alive in a tomb.

Onstage, it felt so immediate it might have been written yesterday: Look at what these men are doing to me, Antigone cries, encompassing the plight of the powerless through all of history. Antigone opened my eyes to the constancy of human suffering and said to me, Nothing changes, nothing ever will. And this is how I tumbled headlong into despair.

Part I of this book, Three Days in Thebes, is in diary form. It details the production itself, focusing primarily on Juliette Binoches performance but also on Ivo van Hoves direction and Anne Carsons translation. It also covers a time after the plays premiere when I spent five days in Amsterdam alone attempting to understand both Antigone and the severe depression descending on me.

In Part II , Handful of Dirt, Carson, Binoche, and van Hove discuss the nature of their collaboration in a collage interviewthat is, I interviewed the three of them at different times and on different continents about the difficulties they had in making their disparate visions of the play coalesce, and then edited the interviews together so it appears as though the three of them are talking together with me in the same room.

When I first interviewed Juliette, she told me that Antigone is one of the roles that kills actresses. Once youve played her, shes hard to get out of your head. Since this was my experience of the character as well, in Part III , Thinking Antigone, I look at other writers who were as transfixed by her and by the play as I was: Friedrich Hegel, Sren Kierkegaard, Virginia Woolf, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig, the author of Antigone, Interrupted.

A brief coda to the book, Antigone in Autumn, revisits the play, its star, and its translator near the end of the Antigone tour, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Binoche and Carson reflect on the production and its tour, on Antigone itself, and on its ultimate effect on them.

Monday, February 23, 2015Cast Rehearsal

Sealed alive in her tomb, Antigone lies on her bier, black-veiled, black translucent garments drifting down.

Voice clear as a childs: I never had a bridal bed I never had a bridal song / I never had the love of children / Im alone on my insides / and I go down to death though I am still alive /... What... What... Line! Give me the fucking line!

The prompter supplies it, but Juliette Binoche sits up in frustration. Why can I never remember this fucking

Director Ivo van Hove calls for a break. Lights come up. Some members of his team move about purposefully, others hover over offstage consoles layered with laptops and other technologies.

Juliette appears at our side, swaddled in a long grey terry dressing gown. And to do this every day, she says to Robert Currie and me. Sometimes two times a day! And for five months! Neither of us has the heart to point out its nine months; the tour premieres the day after tomorrow here at the Grand Thtre de Luxembourg and then moves on to, among other cities, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Edinburgh, New York, and Ann Arbor before closing in late October at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC .