Antigone Undone

Will Aitken

• Publisher: U of R Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780889775213
• eBook ISBN: 9780889775237
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

In 2015 Will Aitken journeyed to Luxembourg for the rehearsals and premiere of Anne Carson's translation of Sophokles' 5th-century BCE tragedy Antigone, starring Juliette Binoche and directed by theatrical sensation Ivo van Hove.In watching the play, he became awestruck with the plight of the young woman at the centre of the action. "Look at what these men are doing to me, " An­tigone cries, expressing the predicament of the dispossessed throughout time. Transfixed by the strange and uncanny power of the play, he finds himself haunted by its protagonist, finally resulting in a suicidal breakdown.With a backstage view of the action, Aitken illuminates the creative process of Carson, Binoche, and Van Hove and offers a rare glimpse into collaborative genius in action. He also investi­gates the response to the play by Hegel, Virginia Woolf, Judith Butler, and others, who too, were moved by its timeless protest against injustice.

Monday, February 23, 2015—Cast Rehearsal

Sealed alive in her tomb, Antigone lies on her bier, black-veiled, black translucent garments drifting down.

Voice clear as a child’s: “I never had a bridal bed I never had a bridal song / I never had the love of children / I’m alone on my insides / and I go down to death though I am still alive / . . . What. . . What. . . Line! Give me the fucking line!”

The prompter supplies it, but Juliette Binoche sits up in frustration. “Why can I never remember this fucking—”

Director Ivo van Hove calls for a break. Lights come up. Some members of his team move about purposefully, others hover over offstage consoles layered with laptops and other technologies.

Juliette appears at our side, swaddled in a long grey terry dressing gown. “And to do this every day,” she says to Robert Currie and me. “Sometimes two times a day! And for five months!” Neither of us has the heart to point out it’s nine months; the tour premieres the day after tomorrow here at the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg and then moves on to, among other cities, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Edinburgh, New York, and Ann Arbor before closing in late October at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

Email from Anne, January 1, 2015

am listening to Sylvia Plath interview [you sent], isn’t she definite, and what a provoking accent. she makes me want to leave the room. how about you?

last night we went to Into the Woods. Currie loves sondheim. it’s pretty fun although sondheim’s songs all sound the same to me and Meryl Streep’s teeth are depressing. remember the xmas day you and i went to West Side Story?

what are you doing in february? you should come to Luxembourg to the opening of Antigone, perhaps you have tons of airmiles by now.

much love ac

Find a flight on CheapOair for under $600, the lowest fare for any European capital. This should tell me something.

Anne mentioned back in May 2014 that she was translating Antigone. Surprising, because she’d already published a free-spirited version called Antigonick, with hand-printed text (by Currie) and cunning drawings—a po-mo comic book.

summer has begun for me on my porch. that is i’m trying to ignore all aspects of the house that need fixing/cleaning/sorting out in order to start again on Antigone which the director in belgium (Ivo van Hove is his name) didn’t like in its Antigonick version so I shall make a version otherwise. at first this request enraged me then i got interested in attempting to outwit myself as it were. It is very fun.

At the time, I’d never heard of Ivo van Hove, but shortly his name would be legion. In September 2014, his radical reconfiguration of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, during which three different casts perform the teleplay simultaneously while the audience moves among them, opened to widespread rapture in New York. His stripped-bare version of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America ran three nights in October at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The theatre’s artistic director said it could have run for months. The Broadway debut of his production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge—already declared a masterpiece in London—premiered in New York. Word was out that he would be directing David Bowie’s Lazarus—a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth, the 1976 sci-fi classic starring Bowie—in 2015, also in New York.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Luxembourg, the world’s last duchy—if Browning were alive, he could write a poem about this—perplexes me, geographically, culturally, economically, linguistically, socially. Constantly shifting itineraries meant I arrived the day before Anne and Currie. A brief yet exorbitant taxi ride from the tiny airport delivered me to my aerie, a slab of ’70s concrete where they hand me a big cookie upon check-in. My room looks on to low mountains that begin where the parking lot leaves off.

Restlessness of arrival. The doorman says it’s ten minutes by taxi to the centre of town. And to walk? He laughs: “Hours and hours.” My zigzag descent in sturdy hiking boots takes me through piney suburbs where the houses, painted in dunnish pastels, look vaguely German—sturdy half-timbering here—and vaguely French—a mansard roof there. It’s just like at breakfast this morning—Bircher muesli!—when my fellow guests greeted me in German or French (though the American middle managers in for an IBM conference offered no salutation whatever as they barrelled toward steam tables stacked high with various forms of pig).

In ninety minutes I arrive at what feels like downtown, or at least touristic Luxembourg, blockish “historical” buildings faced in pale stone or stucco that make up what the locals call Old Quarters and Fortifications—the city was once known as the Gibraltar of Northern Europe—with a belvedere overlooking a deep valley threaded with quaint streams and Hobbit cottages.

I’m on a mission. This notebook’s nearly full. If I’m going to watch three days of run-throughs, rehearsals, pre–dress rehearsal, dress rehearsal, and the premiere—six performances in all—I’ll need more space for taking notes (I’m planning to write a feature about the whole experience for a Canadian newspaper).

I soon discover I can buy a Writer’s Edition Honoré de Balzac Montblanc fountain pen in Luxembourg city centre. A brown leather wallet with trademark green-red-green racing stripe at Gucci. A silver-studded grey fur (squirrel? fox?) sweater at Dolce & Gabbana. A Hoyo de Monterrey Double Epicure cigar at La casa del Habano. A Patek Philippe Full Gold Calatrava Jumbo watch—sorry, timepiece—at le Collection’heure (French puns are always the worst). An Empress Anastasia white gold and diamond tassel pendant at Graal Joaillier.

A stationers? I ask people in the street in various languages. Not here, a man in a nubby tweed overcoat assures me, a lifted eyebrow indicating how preposterous it is of me to ask. This part of the city, I’m beginning to grasp, is for the rich, who live in Luxembourg in abundance in both senses—there are a lot of them and they have a lot. In another part of the city—“Over that way,” a woman with structured hair gestures lazily—ordinary people buy ordinary things for their ordinary little lives.

Eventually I find, tucked away at the back of a tabagie, a couple of shelves of multicoloured notebooks. Except none of them are lined—instead, pages of graph paper in case I wish to chart my daily gains and losses in the global financial market.

After Switzerland, Luxembourg ranks as the biggest tax haven in the world. This is where Kim Jong-il stored his ill-gotten billions. Where Skype and Amazon have moved their European headquarters to evade those irritating corporate taxes less complaisant continental nations insist on.

Frustrated, jetlagged, I taxi back to the hotel. Sixty-five dollars. Too tired to bother with room service, I devour the complimentary fruit plate and the complimentary chocolate bars as well as a can of almonds and two Rémy Martin miniatures from the minibar. I’m writing this on the back cover of my present notebook. No pages left.

7 p.m. Monday, February 24, 2015 —Pre–Dress Rehearsal

Anne, Currie, and I sit a few rows from the stage, coats and scarves draped over the seats in front of us.

“But this will not do!” Ivo hurries up to us. “I must move you back, you are too close.” Since we are the only spectators in the large theatre, there are 940 more seats to choose from. Ivo leads us back six rows. “Yes, much better.” He darts away, a slight, almost adolescent figure—he’s fifty-seven—in jeans and a navy dress shirt.

“And you won’t be spit upon by the actors,” Martina, the makeup girl, whispers, passing by.

Video of a desert projected across the set’s back wall. A wind machine blows dust and bits of trash across the stage. Melancholy scraping sounds from a cello. Enter the daughters of Oidipous—Antigone and Ismene—orphans of many storms. Antigone brusque, full of urgency, already determined on her fatal course. Their perilous position pre-exists the play: “O Ismene / O one and only sister whose blood intersects my own in too many ways / . . . what bitterness pain disgust disgrace or moral shock have we been spared.”

Earlier today this...

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