Antigone

An ode to children in violent circumstances Read the entire interview with director Johan Simons in the digital magazine. You have dealt with Greek tragedies many times. What is so special about "Antigone" for you? SIMONS The people who populate the play carry an incredibly violent past with them. Antigone and Ismene witnessed their father, Oedipus, turn out to be their brother, gouge out his own eyes, and their mother hang herself. Then these children—as I imagine it—accompanied their blind father for years. The sons had to let him curse them, plunged the city of Thebes into a fratricidal war, and killed each other in the process. Antigone and Ismene are left behind. A terrible fate! I can't read the play without seeing this past. The past of children who carry around their own traumas, those of their parents and grandparents, and try to finally resolve them. Against this backdrop, I read this verse, so fantastically translated by Hölderlin, spoken by Antigone, "I am not for hate, I am for love," as a task far too great that Antigone has taken upon herself: the task of healing this family in the realm of the dead. Even more: to heal the whole world by dying for humanity and crying out loud about it. A task that, in the form of exaggerated personal responsibility as supposed self-realization, leads to self-sacrifice—even to the point of death. That is excessive. Magnificent. And also destructive. For me, this play is a kind of ode to children who grow up in violent contexts. I'm interested in what that does to them. It also becomes very personal for me because I myself was born into violent circumstances and grew up in them. How do you understand Creon and his actions? Creon's backstory is that of someone who stands in the second row and, after the ruler's departure, suddenly finds himself confronted with the task of taking on the role at the head of the government. I see him more as a fearful person who is trying to find his way into a role that is too big for him and making mistakes in the process. He is also one of the few remaining members of this family, and he too sees himself as an individual with a kind of duty to do better. His fear makes him hard and blind to other circumstances, other perspectives, and advice. The false claim that he has to manage everything on his own not only makes him fearful, but also distrustful of others. In the end, he sees everyone as an enemy, and out of fear of making himself look ridiculous or not being respected in his authority, he makes a series of wrong decisions. The fantastic and at the same time terrible thing about this character is that he realizes this far too late. Seeing or not being able to see has also been a major theme since Oedipus. Why is now a good time to perform "Antigone"? The play shows how dependent we are—on each other, on nature, on things that cannot be controlled. And it shows how badly we are able to admit this dependence. If we were better at this, we would have to broaden our view of what seems foreign to us, keep our thinking flexible, and train our empathy for better interaction with others. But I think things are looking rather bleak at the moment. In Sophocles' play, all the characters were also played by three actors. At that time, they were all men, and they performed wearing masks. We also have three – Constanze Becker mainly focuses on the texts of Creon, Jens Harzer on those of Antigone and others, Kathleen Morgeneyer seeks the position in between with texts by Ismene and others – but there is something else behind our narrative style.Of course, even today we are still not completely free to choose what role we want to play in life and society and how we want to do so, and so the conflicts that Greek tragedy deals with in relation to human responsibility between power and powerlessness naturally do not cease. For me, theater is a space for thinking, a space in which thoughts and roles are played with, together, in interaction with others, with words, with imagination, with things, with the past and present, and so on. This is where theater offers great freedom. Whereas in life, it is still not quite so simple. And that has to do with our past. With history. Nowadays, I think it also has something to do with algorithms. I believe these have an immense influence on us and on independent thinking. On the level of history, we encounter lonely and isolated figures who are unable to find a common path. On the level of the play, however, we experience brilliant interaction. A small utopia, perhaps. Naive, possibly. But no less significant for that. And that's why these three start out with us as if they were children looking for something to play with amid the fragments of history. They come together and start playing Antigone, trying things out. Children of the gods, in the sense that humans always have a share in the divine, in fate, in the unpredictable, in the monstrous, at the price of becoming victims of these very forces themselves. And if there is no salvation from this conflict, then perhaps there is a kind of consolation. I, at least, find it very comforting when people enjoy themselves—enjoying the interaction, these fantastic texts, the beauty. The interview was conducted by Sibylle Baschung.