Sydney Fringe Festival: ‘Antigone is existential for me’
Antigone! Sydney Fringe Festival 2025
“Antigone is existential for me.”
That’s how the play began. No careful lead-in, no easing the audience into Sophocles. Just a sentence, spoken plainly. A confession and a dare. Existential, not as a lofty theory but as lived experience; a reminder that Antigone’s struggle is not a relic of antiquity but an ever-present dilemma. Love here was not expansive but slotted, wedged into cracks where decree allowed it to breathe. Over everything hovered doom, written into the actors’ jagged, ritualistic movements. From the very beginning, this production placed me, not in ancient Greece but squarely in my own headspace, my confrontations with meaning.
Antigone’s story is a collision between law and love. Creon’s decree against the burial of Polynices was presented with chilling authority—his pride made flesh in the sharpness of his tone, the weight of his presence. Yet Antigone’s defiance was not reckless; it was rooted in devotion, in her unshakable conviction that love and duty to the dead superseded man-made rules. Watching her wrestle with this choice, I felt the existential pull: we define ourselves not in the easy compliance with external laws, but in the moments we dare to act from inner necessity.
Scene two stood out for me most vividly, not because of dialogue, but because of sound. The mournful cry of an instrument filled the stage, a kind of raw lament that seemed to strike directly at the heart. It was as if the strings themselves were voicing grief, rage, and inevitability all at once. The stage became less about words and more about the embodiment of emotion embodied. We, the audience, were reminded that Antigone is not just a play to be understood, but an experience to be felt.
The production blurred time in fascinating ways. While grounded in Sophocles’ ancient text, it never felt bound by it. The chorus shifted seamlessly between modern gestures and traditional cadences, their movements sharp and fluid, almost ghostly. At times, they seemed like voices from another era, warning of consequences that humanity still refuses to learn. At other times, they felt like my own inner monologue, that eternal chorus of doubt, fear, and questioning that accompanies every major decision in life.
What made this staging powerful was its refusal to let the audience stay comfortable. Creon, often painted as a villain, was on this stage rendered human. Stubborn, proud, but not entirely unreasonable. His belief in law as the backbone of society clashed with Antigone’s insistence that love and honor come first. Neither was wholly right, neither wholly wrong. The tragedy lay in the fact that both stood immovable, locked in a battle that could only lead to destruction. The play asked me, as a viewer, a simple but terrifying question: what would you choose? The law that preserves order, or the love that preserves meaning?
This production made Antigone feel less like an ancient tragedy and more like a mirror. I could see its questions reflected in the headlines of today—conflicts between state and conscience, between pride and compassion, between survival and truth. But I could also see it reflected in my own life, in the quiet moments where I choose between safety and honesty, between convenience and conviction.
By the final scene, the stage was stripped bare, but the air remained heavy. Antigone was gone, Creon was broken, and yet the words lingered: “We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us.” I left the theatre with those words still echoing, but they no longer felt like a reminder of despair. Instead, they felt like a challenge. If life is indeed bracketed by death, then the measure of our existence lies in the courage of our choices.
Antigone! Will be performed as part of Sydney Fringe Festival from the 16th-20th of September, 2025.