Antigone [not quite/quiet]: adaptation, the anarchive and afterness

Abstract

This article focuses, from an insider perspective, on a contemporary South African production that was a response to Sophocles’ Antigone, performed at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 2019. The production was titled: Antigone (not quite/quiet) and formed part of the Reimagining Tragedy in Africa and the Global South (ReTAGS) research project. The author is credited as the director of the production. The article provides a detailed discussion of the production dramaturgy and the strategy of adaptation used, and argues that this strategy is different from previous adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy that the author has produced since the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994. The article relates this strategy of adaptation to the anarchive following Jacques Derrida. It then goes on to discuss the production in relation to ideas of afterness and metamorphosis with reference to Ovid and Franz Kafka.

Keywords:

• tragedy
• adaptation
• dramaturgy
• anarchive
• afterness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am using ‘tragedy’ here to refer to the dramatic form as it occurs in the theatre – a particular form of emplotment; and the ‘tragic’ to refer to an event or condition that occurs in the world outside of the theatre and appears to be beyond the limits of meaning or knowledge or discursive expression.

2 In the words of Nelson Maldonado-Torres: ‘Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation’ (2007, p. 243). Coloniality in contrast, refers to: ‘long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjectivity relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism’ (2007, p. 243).

3 Decoloniality is understood here as a reaction against coloniality. For Walter Mignolo, decoloniality is firstly the analytic of the underlying logic of coloniality, and secondly, a prospective praxis of knowing and living oriented by decolonial analysis (2018, p. 227).

4 The parenthesis in the title was intended to point to the fact that the adaptation was not quite the play Antigone as written by Sophocles, even though it was tethered to it at its core, and that it was not a quiet adaptation either, being the ‘scream’ of the youth of South Africa at the time when the production was made. As the messenger says in Ann Carson’s translation of the play: ‘ … the scream is all around us now’ (Carson 2015, p. 50).

5 In this I am influenced by Édouard Glissant’s call for a ‘right to opacity’ (1997, p. 194). For Glissant, the hallmark of Western thought in its encounter with the ‘Other’ is a demand for ‘transparency’ (p. 190). This leads to an ongoing project of assimilation and objectification. Against this he proposes a deliberate ‘opacity’ – ‘not an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity’ (1997, p. 190).

6 It is perhaps interesting to note that theatre director, Eugenio Barba, wrote in a 1985 article that: ‘The word text, before referring to a written or spoken, printed or manuscript text, meant a weaving together. In this sense, there is no performance which does not have text. That which concerns the text (the weave) of the performance can be defined as dramaturgy (1985, p. 75).

7 To be clear, this was not the music composed for the 1840 production but other music from Mendelssohn’s repertoire.

8 For more detail about the performance of the chorus and the experience of being a part of the chorus, see articles by Kanya Viljoen and Balindile Ngcobo in this edition.

9 See Mezzabotta (1994); Van Zyl Smit (1994); Banning (1997).

10 See Von Weyenberg (2013). Chapter 3: The Oresteia in Post-Apartheid South Africa, 91–140; Van Zyl Smit (2010); Steinmeyer (2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [grant # 1804-05734].