Playwright Darren Murphy introduces his new work X'ntigone, which plays on the Abbey Theatre's Peacock stage from 16th - 26th March.
The story of the pandemic is still too monumental, too real, too now, to confront head on. Maybe in five years we can start to tell those stories of what happened to us in March 2020, and how it changed us. For now, I needed a distancing device to write about it with any clarity. Creating a version of Sophocles' timeless and shapeshifting Antigone permitted me to do just that. It created a filter through which I could distil the essence of what I sensed was happening under the skin of our lives at this tumultuous time. It allowed for both an enlargement and a forensic focus. But it is, as it always has been, a play for now.
X’ntigone isn’t about the pandemic, but about what it reveals to us: an essential difference in core values between those with power and agency, and those without it. Creon and X’ntigone embody irreconcilable worldviews, between the demands of the state and the rights of the individual and the family. She says he is 'a ghost who doesn’t know he’s dead yet’ – a relic from another age. He says she is ‘a malicious child who wants to destroy everything she doesn’t understand’ – a petulant teenager. They are both less than real to each other, playing out a pattern set when X’ntigone was a child, a pattern of power, coercion, and control. Today, she is trying to break that pattern.
When a political leader's ego becomes inseparable from the state then every decision, every choice, comes down to a battle of wills, not of policy or strategy.
To begin with, X’ntigone simply wants to bury her brother, a traitor. He’s been left to rot at one of the city’s seven gates as a warning. But that’s no longer enough, now she needs more. She has been radicalised by the craven opportunism of disaster capitalists in lockdown. The atomised rage of her generation has been incubating during the pandemic and has coalesced into a new form of power across the globe. Her plan is extreme, but that’s because the world is extreme. She is simply reacting to what has been revealed to her: a dysfunctional world she needs to destroy and remake.
Creon views the pandemic as a war and uses Churchillian language to justify his actions. He understands that however it’s dressed up, ultimately all wars are about plunder and conquest. When a political leader’s ego becomes inseparable from the state then every decision, every choice, comes down to a battle of wills, not of policy or strategy. Creon, much like Putin, believes the will of the people is the same as his will. His brinkmanship of creating instability, distrust, and division is straight out of Putin’s playbook. It doesn’t matter how he holds to power, only that he does. It is not just because he is power-hungry; he sees it as his calling, a responsibility to step up to the plate. From his perspective, it is not only his right, but his obligation.
My version of Antigone pares back the action to its core conflict between Creon and his rebellious niece, X’ntigone. It’s a thriller, of sorts. But it’s also the story of a family. Of an uncle trying to control his niece; a powerful leader versus a girl without agency; a king who needs to maintain order in the pestilent city versus a young woman who needs to bury her brother—an act which threatens the public health of that city. It’s about sedition, insurgency, and power. It’s about how weaponizing a plague pits personal tragedy against the stringent civic demands of a corrupt and weak leadership. There have been dozens of versions of this classic because Antigone always speaks to the moment with urgency and precision.
X'ntigone is a co-production between Prime Cut Productions and the MAC, presented by the Abbey Theatre on the Peacock stage from Weds 16th - Sat 26th March - find out more here.
