Writer: Sophocles
Adaptor: Lulu Raczka
Director: Finn den Hertog
Creon, the king whose decree drives Sophocles’ tragedy, never appears in Lulu Raczka’s Antigone. His law reaches the stage only as rumour and threat. The play belongs instead to two teenage sisters: one who will bury their brother, and one who will have to live on without her.
They are the daughters of Oedipus, who unknowingly married his own mother, and in Raczka’s modern, unnamed city the scandal still clings to them. When their brothers die on opposite sides of a war for the throne, one is carried home a hero and the other is left outside the gates as a traitor, unburied on Creon’s orders.
Antigone (Eilidh Loan) resolves to bury him anyway. Her younger sister Ismene (Holly Howden Gilchrist) tries to talk her out of it, then to talk her into an apology that might save her life. In Finn den Hertog’s production, the two actors narrate the story in their own Scottish voices and play its other characters too.
Loan plays Antigone as a live wire, flinging herself face down across the sofa and leaping about the room as if stillness were unbearable. When she sings, and she sings beautifully, the fury falls away and the girl underneath is briefly visible.
Howden Gilchrist’s Ismene is the one who keeps things in order. She carries in an armful of flowers and arranges them with care, and her scene coaching Antigone through a practice apology is desperate and oddly tender.
When the sisters fight, though, they really fight. Vicki Manderson’s movement direction gives their clashes a startling physical commitment, and by the climax Ismene’s flowers lie strewn across the floor.
Milla Clarke’s set is a plush, fluffy teenage bedroom built around a big sofa, a cosy refuge from the brutality outside. That refuge is breached when Antigone goes to bury her brother, as Lewis den Hertog’s video fills the space with a vast projection of earth and a looming, frightening Antigone digging into it. In a play that otherwise narrates its great events at one remove, the sheer scale of the image lands like a blow.
The final stretch belongs to Ismene. Where Sophocles lets her slip quietly out of his play, Raczka follows her across the decades that come after, through marriage, children and loss, as she keeps asking whether she could ever have done what her sister did. Alone on stage, Howden Gilchrist gathers the flowers back into neat order as she speaks, then lies down at the foot of the sofa, and it is a haunting closing image.
At 95 minutes without an interval, the piece does ask for patience. The early scenes of gossip, daydreams and an ill-judged trip to a bar take their time to reveal what is at stake.
Stick with it. This is a fierce, funny and tender Antigone that turns a classic debate about law and conscience into a row between sisters, then asks who is left to live with the consequences.
Runs until 10 October 2026 | Image: Mihaela Bodlovic
