Pick-and-mix fantasy

Welcome to Thebes
Olivier, in rep until 18 August

La Bête
Comedy, booking to 4 September

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Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

My mind didn’t just boggle. My whole body did. Every sensory organ joined in the process — ears, eyes, nose, teeth, tongue. All boggled. Even my left shoulder started boggling at one point, although this turned out to be the oscillating snuffles of my neighbour as he dozed serenely against my arm. The source of these disturbances was Moira Buffini’s reconfiguration of Sophocles’ Antigone, which is currently chasing its tail around the Olivier. The setting is a hyper-muddle. We’re in Thebes, a failed third-world state, where kids armed with machine guns strut about the place jabbering in the gangsta patois of east London. Though the citizens of this imaginary hellhole are starving and brutalised they are also enlightened freethinkers. They can’t read or write but they know their Simone de Beauvoir backwards and they’ve just elected their first female president, Eurydice.

Meanwhile, Theseus, the leader of a nearby superpower, has arrived by helicopter to monitor the new government’s progress, and he watches with wry detachment as President Eurydice, showing a Hattie Harmanesque flair for gunpoint egalitarianism, selects an all-female cabinet. What’s missing from this pick-and-mix fantasy is any clarity or coherence. It’s tribal and backward. It’s feminist and progressive. It’s then. It’s now. It’s Athens, it’s Somalia, it’s Afghanistan. It’s irritating. At one point Ms Buffini tries to honour her Sophoclean sources and her matriarchal longings by making President Eurydice forbid the burial of Polynices on the grounds that the turf where his body is rotting should become a ‘peace park’ in which citizens might ponder the evils of war.

As soon as this wonky brainwave teetered out of Ms Buffini’s mind she should have admitted defeat and dropped the script in the ‘Noble Failure’ drawer which every playwright keeps half-open in order to protect the world from unnecessary torments and to preserve the public morale of the theatre.