Antigone in Palestine

Where are we? In Thebes, Jenin or Ramallah? Nehad Selaiha watches Sophocles's Antigone at the AUC
The scene facing me at the Falaki Theatre was one of total devastation: the ruins of a city ravaged by war or wrecked by a violent earthquake. In the eerie blue light enveloping the stage you could make out, high up, near the flies, what looked like a huge crane lying on its side, precariously perched on top of the slanting wall of a gutted, collapsed building, with other wreckage flanking it on either side. Red light flickered here and there from underneath the rubble through metal bars. Stancil Campbell's set, it seemed, had transported the Greek Thebes to the West Bank -- to Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah -- and it was obvious, even for those who had not had time to glance at the programme before the show, and even before the actors stormed in through the auditorium in modern dress and combat uniform, to face us silently for a brief, unsettling moment, where the production was heading and where director Frank Bradley and his crew had taken their inspiration.
You could feel the whole auditorium tensing up and edging forward in their seats as Wiam El-Tamami (a thin, pale Antigone, in jeans and black sweater) and Jasmin Sobhi (looking pathetically frail in a huge, coarse shawl as Ismene) flitted through the ruins like tormented ghosts then crouched in the shadows, breathlessly whispering, with the red glow of a dying fire, still simmering somewhere under the rubble, playing on their faces. When Kreon (Michael Guirgis) marched in, tall, fair and imposing, in combat gear, to deliver his edict into a microphone from a podium (as if before TV cameras), with his queen Eurydike in a prim suit (like a typical first lady) and his son, Haimon, in uniform, standing at a discreet distance behind, smiling benignly, while photos of the corpses of Eteokles and Polyneikes were ceremoniously displayed to the viewers, the old Thebes took a leap forward into the present and however hard one tried one could not shut out the image of suicide-bomber, Wafaa Idris, from one's mind.
In his director's notes, Bradley says: "When, a year ago, we chose to put Antigone on our season, the world seemed innocent. When, last November, we began discussing among ourselves the conceptual approach, September 11 had changed everything. Since beginning rehearsals in early March, the world has gotten uglier, more despairing. We haven't spent a lot of time talking directly about recent world events, but there is no doubt that they have worked their way into Antigone, perhaps on a more subconscious than conscious level. This Antigone is not a comment on recent events, but a reaction to them."
Subconsciously or otherwise Bradley's Antigone, vividly cast in the immediate historical context of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the US campaign against terror, could not but evoke the dual, paradoxical image of Wafaa as martyr/terrorist. Bradley and his team were careful not to sentimentalise her, not to give a one-sided view of her action or her conflict with Kreon -- though, in the final analysis, the balance of sympathy slightly tips in her favour. However much sympathy this Antigone provokes, one is never allowed to forget that the central conflict in the play is not a melodramatic one of good versus evil, but is, rather, one between two passionately held principles of right. While the production touches a raw nerve in its Arab audience, unwaveringly underlining the overweening confidence of Kreon and the intolerant arrogance of military power, it never allows them to sidestep the fact of the equally destructive intolerance of the oppressed. When Antigone says to Kreon: "There is nothing that you can say/ That I should wish to hear, as nothing I say/ Can weigh with you," the hopelessness of the Arab/Israeli deadlock becomes the shared responsibility of both parties. The way out of this lethal deadlock suggested by the production will hardly cut any ice with either party; if anything, it will trigger accusations of treason on either side. Bradley, however, states it, for all it is worth. Explaining his own reading of Sophocles's play, he says: "His 2500 year old perspective suggests that we'd all be better off with a less rigid sense of self, one that does not consider it a sign of weakness to admit one's own limits when faced with larger forces. He tells us that we cannot sacrifice our capacity to judge, to evaluate, even in the face of ideas that shake our foundations. We must accept our enemies, our dead."
But what if 'our enemies' are still very much alive and in absolute control? What do you do with all the anger and the rage? What do you do with the bereaved women wandering through the rubble of what was once their homes? Instead of a 'chorus' of Theban male elders, Bradley, with the help of Laurance Rudic, gave us a chorus of six women (as if to counterpoint and gainsay Kreon's chauvinistic statement: "Take them, and keep them within -- / The proper place for women,") with whom every peace- loving person on either side of the Palestinian/Israeli border could identify. (Even in Sophocles's time, peace-loving was obviously identified -- and despised -- as a 'feminine' trait; Antigone says: "My way is to share my love, not share my hate." To which Kreon replies: "Go then, and share your love among the dead./ We'll have no woman's law here, while I live.")
In this context, one is tempted to identify with Haemon, the person in whom their tragedy and the whole situation is personified and brought to a single focus -- a young man, betrothed to the woman whom he honours for her courage and piety, and son to the king whom he has respected and longs to go on respecting for his fatherhood and for his office. I, for one, remembered the Peace Now movement who watched over the check-points to help Palestinians and who braved the siege around the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem attempting to smuggle in food and medicine, the articles of Alisa Solomon in the Village Voice, among other brave American Jews (who were told last year by fellow-Jews in a demonstration, "You're the ones Hitler missed"), and the level-headed speeches of Hanan Ashrawi.
But Haemon dies in Sophocles's play as well as in Bradley's production; and what remains is a warning, an elegy and, in Bradley's words, an "opportunity to join in spirit those who inhabit the fallen cities of the West Bank and Gaza." With him "we appeal that the siege of their cities be lifted so that they can rebuild their lives in freedom and dignity."
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