Antigone By Fire is a beautiful, impassioned, haunting production, told around a blazing fire, as a 441 BCE play claims the chill and darkness of a 2023 night.

Don’t let the content warning – “Antigone contains physical violence, death, and suicide” – deter you. The 75-minute play – a Two Planks and a Passion Theatre production at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, near Canning – is strong stuff but the actual violence is done more figuratively than literally.

Kate Besworth’s script, based on the original tragedy by Sophocles, tells the story from both an ancient and contemporary perspective. The dialogue is modern but the setting is old. The chorus – a wonderful, crawling, unified entity that is perhaps supportive, perhaps eagerly awaiting the worst – acknowledges that humans don’t listen to them.

Antigone is a young woman whose traitorous brother has been killed; his body lies unburied in the desert and she must bury him to save his soul.  However, Creon, the new king and her uncle, has decreed that anyone who buries the body will be arrested and put to death.

It may sound remote but the play bristles with themes of law and duty; kingship; doomed, young love; the value of principles over self-preservation; sibling love; familial struggle – themes that have reverberated throughout the centuries.

Vancouver director Ming Hudson, who first conceived of the show with Besworth for Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach festival, has two powerful leads in Kih Becke as Antigone and Omar Alex Khan as Creon. Their force is matched in a bitter conflict making their climactic confrontation riveting.

Like Hamlet, Becke’s Antigone is a rebellious, distraught teenager in a dysfunctional family within a rigid society. She can be briefly tender with her beloved Haimon (Creon’s son) but is clear-eyed and steely in her mission. 

She pushes away her sister Ismene (Rosie Callaghan), a beautiful, lively character who prefers jewelry to politics, and her mother Jocasta, powerfully portrayed as a bruised survivor and a grieving mother by Michelle Fisk.  She also casts off Haimon (Henricus Gielis), a whimsical, loving boy so different from his harsh father. (Gielis is also vivid as the ravaged body and ghost of Antigone’s brother.)

The play, as written and directed, contrasts love and tenderness – Ismene cradling Jocasta, Haimon kissing a freckle on Antigone’s cheek – with the savagery of human beings in power struggles.. 

The music – Greek song – composed by Gielis with Callaghan and Khan with lyrics adapted from Sophocles’ Antigone, is key to setting the mood and time period. Diego Cavedon Dias’s costumes are ragged robes that are both Grecian and timeless and perfectly suit the chorus with Antigone’s beautiful blue gown setting her apart.

The Chorus of the Long Dead – whose crisp clear voices startle the air – includes Burgundy Code and Chris O’Neill as the dominant members with, at different times, all the other cast members except Becke.

Beswoth’s language is often electric, extremely visual and poetic. You can almost see Antigone in a cave even though she is standing in front of a fire.

The firelight adds a powerful atmosphere of primal, epic energy as if these characters created over 2,000 years ago live again for one brief flicker of time and their struggles have not been without meaning or memory. The tears on Antigone’s cheeks as she struggles with fear and doubt are only visible in glimpses when flames cast their orange light which is more powerful – as if you’ve discovered a secret – than if her face were in full light.

Depending on the night you go you may hear barking dogs and coyotes and think of “the dogs of war,” and see the same moon that shone when Sophocles wrote his prize-winning, oft-adapted play.

Antigone by Fire runs Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 9 p.m. Running on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays at 6 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., is The Wind and The Willows adapted from the classic tale by Kenneth Grahame with book and lyrics by Ken Schwartz and music and lyrics by Allen Cole, who was music consultant to Antigone. (Antigone would not be good for small children but teens would like it.)

BUY TICKETS – Ross Creek Centre for the Arts and Two Planks and a Passion Theatre (artscentre.ca)

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