Antigone: Creon
Alessandro Conetta, the actor playing Creon is striving to match up what we know of the character from the first two plays in Sophocles’ trilogy (Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus) with the tyrannical autocrat in the final play Antigone. In Oedipus the King, Creon appears to favor the will of the gods above decrees of state. Even when Oedipus says that once dethroned he must be exiled, Creon waits for the approval of the gods to carry out the order once he has been crowned king. Here, Creon is a reasonable and modest, staying calm and maintaining his dignity when condemned by Theseus. These shifts in personality as seen in the three plays need to be negotiated carefully by the actor playing him. In some way, knowledge of these apparent inconsistencies frees Alessandro. He has license to soften the character’s hard edges, to make him far more human, less two-dimensional, grim or villainous than the character is often played. My own view is that Creon is caught between a rock and a hard place- unable to satisfy everyone- least of all himself. In his situation he can only make wrong choices! As a new ruler he has to be seen not show favouritism, or be nepotistic towards his own family, or to just back down. By the same token, he escape censure by his own family or the gods for enforcing the law of the land. Creon asserts his loyalty to the state and his expectation that others must adhere to the same principles right at the very start of the play. Immediately following this, news arrives of the traitorous burial of Polynices, enemy of the state, by one of his own people. Showing us a troubled man with conflicted loyalties, caught between a rock and a hard place, inspires more potential fear, sympathy and pity for Creon’s dilemma, than the stock ‘Tyrant’ archetype. It becomes harder to pigeonhole and dismiss the new king as ‘The Evil Bully’. The central argument between the two main characters allows the audience’s sympathies to waver and switch throughout the course of the action, especially when Gem Mordin is interpreting the eponymous heroine as a recalcitrant, obstreperous teen. The contest for occupation of the moral high ground is not so simple and straightforward as Good versus the Bad. Creon is motivated by loyalty to the state, Antigone to a certain extent by stubborn pride. Characters can be right for the wrong reasons, and wrong for the right reasons. That is what makes this play so interesting and Wisdom so hard won. The audience response to their central conflict becomes more nuanced, complex and all the richer for the ambiguities created by this interpretation.
