Anne Carson's Translation Of Antigone

This Wednesday my classmates and I went to see Anne Carson's translation of Antigone at Ann Arbor's Power Center. The show was put on by the Brooklyn Academy Of Music, and directed by Ivo Van Hove. The show was strong and powerful from the moment it started, the audience could feel a seriousness as Juliette Binoche starts off the show. The show started off with Juliette Binoche standing there with so sound but the wind. While that's happening, we saw a backdrop of a desert with just wind blowing nothing else. That would shortly be broken by the appearance of Kirsty Bushell. Though the show had a powerful beginning, it lost its audience interest shortly after the the first scene once I realized how confusing the pay was gonna be.
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The first reason is to have a small cast which allowed Mr.Hove to have more time which each individual actor or actress to work on their character/characters. The second reason is I feel Ivo Van Hove wanted to the audience to relate to the chorus. I feel this was ineffective because the actors did not do a specific act to indicate to the audience that they were switching roles so the audience had to guess what role the actor or actress was playing at that time. This made it extremely difficult for me to follow if I wouldn't have read the play I would have had a really hard time knowing what was going on because, the only way I knew if they were the chorus the other rolle was by the line as they were saying. I also noticed the acting by all of the cast but most specifically by the two out of three main characters. I focused on their connection with each other. The two actresses connection I will be talking about are, Antigone, played by Juliette Binoche, Ismene played by Kirsty Bushell. I strongly believe the acting was phenomenal as it gave structure …show more content…
The backdrop played videos or projected pictures and it was mostly projecting when there was a speech. The backdrop you show earthly pictures or videos for Antigone. For example, when she died the backdrop showed a video of a dead tree in the desert. The backdrop also did this for Creon but, instead of nature in the background you had urban areas, people walking slowly towards us. I took the backdrop as a way to indicate the character's feelings and the difference between Antigone and Creon. I feel like that was the director's purpose to show how Creon is about the city and ruling the people and Antigone just feels alone in this dried up desert. I believe that this was effective because it did show the feelings of each character and it got me to feel the same way during that time. What also made the backdrop really effective was it was only used on only Creon and Antigone which made it personal and sent a powerful