Common backcloth: Fleishman’s Antigone (not quite/quiet) and Soyinka’s ‘The fourth stage’

Abstract

Dramatists and theatre makers are often drawn to Sophocles’ Antigone hence they reimagine and recruit the Attic tragedy to serve various political and aesthetic purposes. One of such reworkings of the ancient text is Mark Fleishman’s Antigone (not quite/quiet) which addresses grave issues of concern in post-apartheid South Africa. In this essay I will use a mythopoesis woven around Ògún, the Yoruba God of Warfare and Creativity, through Wole Soyinka’s essay, ‘The Fourth Stage’ and its broader relation to other cross-cultural aesthetics as an analytical strategy, to discuss Antigone (not quite/quiet) as a cross-cultural theatre production that engages despicable events such as sexual and gender-based violence and xenophobia in post-1994 South Africa. The essay will stress how ritual and theatre co-exist in the play and are useful to a productive engagement with unfavourable social circumstances in the country.

Keywords:

• Antigone
• Fleishman
• intermediality
• Ògún
• post-apartheid
• Soyinka

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 As the story goes, following disequilibrium which resulted from the dismantling of ÒrìṣàNlá, the Absolute Whole and Essence, into countless pieces, perpetual chaos and gloom threatened existence, ‘famine scorched the earth, semen atrophied in the genital sac, women’s menstruation ceased … divinities and humanity together experienced a grief about the separation of ‘essence’ from ‘self’’ (Adéèkó 1998, p.15). However, determined to mend the broken permanence in which divinity and mortals once existed, Ògún, one of the shards from the Essence, the one that best represents the creative and destructive impulses, came into his own, ‘to balance what is otherwise out of balance’ and released ‘from within him the most energetic, deeply combative inventions’ (Adéèkó 1998, pp. 16–17; Soyinka 1976, p. 146), to suggest through his action that a certain ‘theory of the way the world works’ exists (Barnes 1989, p. 19).

2 See: ‘African BLOG TAKEOVER #5’ https://classicalreception.org/african-blog-takeover-5/ See also: ‘African BLOG TAKEOVER #6’ https://classicalreception.org/african-blog-takeover-6/ and for the digitization of the RETAGS project, see: ‘African BLOG TAKEOVER #8’ https://classicalreception.org/african-blog-takeover-8/

3 See: ‘African BLOG TAKEOVER #13’ https://classicalreception.org/african-blog-takeover-13/

4 Interestingly, Àtúndáolú which means ‘Reinvention’, embodies creative expressions as in recreation, or in this case, adaptation, appropriation etc., but Fleishman prefers ‘reimagination’ as the operative term for his ReTAGS project.

5 I cite here the unpublished manuscript of the ‘Ismene’ section of the play that was given to me by Jennie Reznek, who wrote it and also played the part of Ismene in the production.

6 I refer here to a particular rehearsal session of the play that I witnessed at Magnet Theatre when some of the actors who played Antigone used headscarf. Although they did not use it during the actual production, I have mentioned it because of its cultural relevance and significance to my analysis.

7 I am citing here from the part of the Antigone section that was written by the South African poet, Mandisa Vundla.

8 Ancient Greek / Old Norse mythology about Triskaidekaphobia (the fear of thirteen) also recalls the numeral composition of Antigone in Fleishman’s production.

Additional information

Funding

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