Roslyn Packer Theatre, January 4
7.5/10
This, I promise you, is like nothing you have seen. An ancient Greek tragedy is fused with an ongoing global calamity in Brazil to create Antigone in the Amazon. Mythology and reality, it tells us, are one and the same. The civil war that backgrounds Sophocles’ timeless play finds its parallel in the 1996 police massacre of 19 Brazilians who were peacefully protesting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, “the lungs of the planet”, which is being cleared at the rate of a football field every minute. About a fifth of it has now gone.
Directed by Milo Rau and devised by Rau and an ensemble comprising members of his Belgian-based NTGent company and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in the Amazon, including survivors of the massacre, it’s a dialogue on many levels. One is between 2,500 years ago and now; another between the stage and projected videos; another between process and outcome.
Initially the four on-stage actors introduce themselves and the character(s) they play. During the performance they also speak of their experience living with their collaborators in the Amazon for a month, and how that changed them forever.
Sara De Bosschere, twice an Antigone in Sophocles’ version, now plays Creon, the dictator who condemns Antigone for burying her dead brother against his decree – a decree which, itself, broke all codes of decency. Frederico Araujo plays Antigone (and others) on stage, while Kay Sara does so on screen. Arne De Tremerie is Creon’s son and Pablo Casella performs live music, is the chorus, and was choir master for the on-screen participants. The philosopher and activist Ailton Krenak speaks as a modern-day, on-screen incarnation of the seer Tiresias, now predicting not just Creon’s destruction, but the planet’s, unless greed is abated.
Sometimes the on-screen action is duplicated concurrently on stage, so Amazon and theatre become one, just as personal tragedy and communal tragedy become one. The reenactment of the massacre is confronting, as it was for those who participated. (Ex-president Bolsonaro joked about this event while in power, and called the protesters “terrorists”.)
It is a work that makes you question the purpose of art and assumptions about what constitutes “good” art. Certainly Rau is clearcut in his imperative that theatre is nothing if it is not striving to change the world for the better: to stand with the Antigones who are activists in the cause of good and justice. Of course we know from North Korea and Hitler’s Germany that it’s so easy for politically motivated art to cross the line to mere propaganda, and this show may well be seen like that by ranchers and miners from the vast swathes of flattened Amazon.
But the cause here is undeniably just and the points are powerfully made. If some of the acting fails to move us as much as it is intended to, the verbatim on-screen material amply compensates.
https://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/events/antigone-in-the-amazon