As with the original, The Burial at Thebes focuses on the never resolved conflict between a person's individual rights and the demands of the state. Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney delivers an exquisite adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone, reviving the Greek tale of love and self-sacrifice for a contemporary audience.

'Best non-musical play: In a year marked by strong work by this company, this revamp of Sophocles’ “Antigone” was the piece you could not tear your eyes away from.' - The Nashua Telegraph Boettiger Theater at the Derryfield School Thus, the absolute power of the state is undermined by her – but at the same time reinforced by the fate of King Creon.Nancy S. In that respect, despite the fact that the protagonist, Antigone, is defying the order of the state in favor of the one of kinship, she is still bound to an order that is even higher than the one of the state apparatus: that of the gods. Those who overbear will be brought to grief.įate will flail them on its winnowing floor Partly because the perpetrator – Antigone, who disregarded law in favor of custom – is not saved, but commits suicide before she can be freed, but also because the text relies heavily on religious imagery:Īlways rule by the gods and reverence them. Personally, I don’t think this is the case. Over a ferocious battle, they both perish in the mighty battle, Eteocles and Polyneices. The play Burial at Thebes is a modern translation of Antigone by Sophocles and Seamus Heaney is credited for this recent translation. There is a war between brothers over power and the two are clashing over the crown in Thebes. Is this conclusion problematic, in the sense that it teaches us that there are values that are more important than the state apparatus? QUOTE The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone translated by Seamus Heaney. And Bush was using a similar strategy, asking, in effect: Are you in favor of state security or are you not? If you don’t support the eradication of this tyrant in Iraq and the threat he poses to the free world, you are on the wrong side in ‘the war on terror’. Bush in the afterword of his translation, in order to demonstrate that the issues of this text are still relevant today:Įither you are a patriot, a loyal citizen, and regard Antigone as an enemy of the state because she does honour to her traitor brother, or else you yourselves are traitorous because you stand up for a woman who has broken the law and defied my authority. Moreover, Heaney compares King Creon to George W.

King Creon – who fails to observe that, and acts against the will of the Gods – is robbed of all his most precious possessions. The previous excerpt illustrates the dilemma that is presented in Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes: the characters are torn between custom and law, between kinship and state.Īs the story progresses, we can clearly discern that custom is considered to be more important than law.

The burial at thebes