Word: anouilh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Antigone (adapted from the French of Jean Anouilh by Lewis Galantiere; produced by Katharine Cornell in association with Gilbert Miller) was born of the Nazi occupation of Paris. Playwright Anouilh (pronounced Ahn-oo-ee) reworked the famed Antigone of Sophocles with a furtive and topical eye: Antigone's defiance of King Creon's edict that her brother Polynices' body must lie unburied might be a spur to French resistance. In writing the play, Anouilh was plainly walking on eggs. Not only must his Antigone hearten the French, but his Creon must not offend the Germans...
When Antigone reached Broadway last week, its symbolic side had lost its urgency. What remained most provocative was its experimental side-the changes Anouilh had made in Sophocles' story, the slangy prose he had often substituted for austere poetry, the modern flourishes (card playing, automobiles) and modern dress. They gave a mild fillip to a classic story, but they did not make for an effective play. This Antigone, barring its one big clash between despot and defier, was flat, fumbly theater. This Antigone, shorn of her Resistance aura, was unmoving and unreal. And in a modernish setting, the burial...
...Anouilh uses the play of Sophocles for his plot. Had he left the original there and gone on to write a drama of twentieth century significance, with the frame of reference brought completely up to date, he would probably have produced a work of greater unity and consistency...
...Guthrie McClintic uses a plain but forceful set modeled after a Grecian interior, but dresses every character in 1946 evening clothes: the lines are a strange admixture of sonorous, poetic speeches for the high-born--tragic figures in the Aristotelian sense--and lower-level American slang for the vulgar; Anouilh preserves the Greek hours, but transforms it into a single narrator reminiscent of "Our Town...
...Anouilh ie most successful in a not unworthy purpose, the addition of a political motive to the traditional religious one for Antigone's acts. Antigone, in the version of Sophocles, was willing to die in order to bury her brother, to save him from the eternal torture which otherwise awaited his shade. In the present interpretation she funds, as the play progresses, other reasons, of equally high principle, why it is essential for her to die rather than compromise...