Antigone

The theme of following a higher moral law and the dictates of conscience vs. obedience to authority is at the heart of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. This conflict is explicitly illustrated during the debate between Antigone and Creon at the climax of the play. This theme is all the more significant when considered against the historical backdrop of Anouilh’s version, the themes in Sophocles’ original Oedipus trilogy, and the clever way in which the playwright managed to get his political drama past the Nazi censorship and onto the stage.

When adapting Antigone, Anouilh could have just as easily set the play in a different location, but he decided to keep the setting in Thebes. In Ancient Thebes, it was common for the bodies of enemies to be left to rot. Like Sophocles before him, who “virtually makes Athenians of his principal Thebans” (8), Anouilh instills the morals of Athenians into Antigone. Lewis Galantière, who translated this edition of Anouilh’s play into English, explains:

[T]he people of Athens had a deep sense of the sanctity of human personality, a profound belief that all men—friends and enemies, the righteous and the unrighteous—were created by God, possessed some sort of immortality, and deserved sacramental burial.