My idea was simple: handle Sophocles’ version as an individual shard of broken jug and tessellate it with other shards, in the hope that this process might make it possible to realise some sort of truth. (Slavoj Žižek)

The classic tragedy by Sophocles about Antigone, a young girl who resists the laws of the ruling class when she decides to bury her brother Polynices, in Žižek’s interpretation becomes a topical and contemporary work examining social and political relationships between those in government and citizens, between the divine and earthly law. In his new rendering of a classic theatrical model, Slavoj Žižek reaches for the principle of the triad (meaning: triás – a principle of the trinitarian unity of thesis, antithesis and synthesis): in his version of Antigone, which he outlines as an ethical-political exercise in the manner of Brecht’s didactic pieces, Žižek offers three possible endings for this tragedy, leaving the audience the freedom of deciding the fate of a modern-day Antigone. A thorough analysis of Europe as a system today would open up a view of the Euro crisis, the refugee crisis, Brexit, austerity, the tightening of border controls, the building of fences and isolationism, various infiltrations and the atmosphere of fake news – a view of a world threatened by the disintegration of Europe. The evening at the theatre with Antigone opposes this sinister scenario with a pan-European answer. If Slavoj Žižek addresses the issue of which type of, and which, Antigone could justly (objectively) judge the circumstances of our time? Antigone, who, one might think, oscillates between the two extremes of traditionalist and fundamentalist: unconditionally, she insists on a symbolic demand, citing “custom and ancient laws of the gods.” For Creon, however, these laws are not valid because they are not the product of a legislative process by the state. Antigone, on the other hand, does not need such a constitutional form, and her faith alone is enough. And when the ritual fails at its completion, Antigone remains only the suicide as the last symbolic gesture. In this post-political world, whose defining feature is the consensus, is the only position of genuine dissent left is, that of the traditionalist (who is clinging to the past and refusing to accept the inevitability of the new global neoliberal order) or the fundamentalist? So how is rebellion still possible today?

Angela Richter’s production wants to encourage thought about how it would be possible to reawaken the political spirit in the form of a politics for those who have no voice in this Europe of crisis and upheaval. This premiere affirms the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb as one of the centres of innovation in European theatre.

Slavoj Žižek and Angela Richter, biographies