New Play in Manhattan

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 issue on which the plot hinges seemed outlandishly bizarre.

As written by Sophocles, the play tells the story of Oedipus' daughter Antigone, whose two brothers kill each other in a quarrel over who shall succeed their dead father. When Creon, Antigone's uncle, takes the throne, he issues his edict that one of the brothers must lie unburied, as a lesson that the law must be enforced. Protesting this indignity, Antigone twice attempts to bury the body. Her efforts fail, she is caught and condemned to death, finally commits suicide.

As such, the story cannot fetch a complete response from modern, morticianed man. The circumstances lie outside his experience; it is not the reality, it is only the intensity of Antigone's emotions that can stir him. In Sophocles' version, the plot at least has the psychology of a superstitious age and a religious people behind it--although even this has not kept Sophocles' Antigone from sometimes being accounted a young woman with a decided martyr complex.

The Antigone of Anouilh, unswayed by religion, unfond of her brother, and in love with life, can only be accounted a fanatical idealist--a character into whom Katharine Cornell finds it almost impossible to breathe life. On the other hand, Anouilh's Creon is at once the least Sophoclean and the most successful person in the play. He is an astute, cynical worldling whose decree is merely a sop to the crowd and whose desire is to save his niece's life; and he is played with chilling elegance by Sir Cedric Hardwicke. If Antigone has ethics on her side, Creon has logic on his--which may explain why the Nazis raised no squawk.

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