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Canberra Today 28°/29° | Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Arts / Young players think big

Stefanie Lekkas and Tom Mifsud in "Antigone". Photo by Cathy Breen
Stefanie Lekkas and Tom Mifsud in “Antigone”. Photo by Cathy Breen
“THE play is still relevant, we are all still human and we need to think bigger than ourselves,” says cast member Stefanie Lekkas of the coming “Antigone – The Greek Project” by Canberra Youth Theatre, based on Sophocles’ confronting tragedy of the same name.

It is, of course, a very well-known play, famously “rebooted” by Jean Anouilh in 1944 during the Nazi occupation of France and used by German philosopher Hegel to prove that, in Greek tragedy, the conflict is not between good and evil, but between opposing “goods”.

In the play the princess Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, claims the right to bury her brother Polyneices, forbidden burial by King Creon as an enemy of the state. Personal conscience clashes with law. Creon will not compromise and nor will Antigone, who goes, some say ardently, to her “bride-bed” death.

CYT staffer Jess Baker says the play will be staged in C Block at Gorman Arts Centre, where they will “play with space to give it quite an unusual feeling”.

The deliberately grungy costumes designed by Kate Llewellyn will be butchers’ aprons, conjuring up the “hanging meat” that the cast has imagined for the tragic characters.

“This plays comes from a very dark place,” Baker says.

“It’s hard to watch for the viewers, so we have used a lot of physical technique so that we can relate to an audience.”

It’s been particularly interesting for Lekkas, who is of Greek origin. She’s the workshop co-ordinator and a cast member, so has been able to advise fellow-actors on some of the Greek meanings, for instance Oedipus means “swollen foot” and Antigone can mean “anti-parent”.

“This play has survived thousands of years and some of the things are still there in Greek culture,” she says. Although a drawback is that while everybody knew who the gods were then, they don’t now.

Lekkas plays Antigone’s sister Ismene, seemingly subservient, but showing more complexity as the play progresses, unlike Antigone, who says at the outset, “here’s what I’m going to do” and does it.

“Sometimes we have replaced the words with actions, but not always,” she says, explaining that the cast have jointly developed the choral elements according to their own ideas, shying away from the verbal emphasis on the Greek deities and even from the fact that Antigone is a woman.

“We’ve taken the gender out of it,” she says.

“Antigone – The Greek Project”, C block, Gorman Arts Centre, Braddon, Thursday, September 1-3. Bookings to cytc.net

 

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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