Welcome to Thebes
Olivier, in rep until 18 August
La Bête
Comedy, booking to 4 September
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.
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