Do Antigone and her family still have things to teach us? This question thrown at the spectators at the beginning ofAntigone under the midday sun, presented for the very first time at the Maison Théâtre, opens a Pandora’s box and prepares the spectators to drop their blinders and to plunge in silence into this classic “loaded with life, death and many questions”.
In this new Carrousel creation – co-produced with the Gilles-Vigneault theater – Suzanne Lebeau democratizes Sophocle’s work while highlighting the astonishing contemporaneity of the themes. On the one hand, Antigone (Citlali Germé), with her thirst for life, her critical sense and her law, that of the heart; on the other Creon (Ludger Côté), with his doubts, power and his truth drawn from the law of the State. Between the two, a family torn by conflict, twins thirsty for power, Ismene, the little sister frightened by the plague which is decimating the city of Thebes, Jocasta, the mother and her heavy secret, Oedipus who will have a miserable end.
Suzanne Lebeau manages with a naturalness of which she alone has the key, to purify the complexity of this immense tragedy while retaining the power of the subject. The fluidity and simplicity of the story are due in particular to the presence of a narrator (Sasha Samar), who, addressing the spectators, tells the story in the past while questioning the events.
Is it important to keep your word? Why do small conflicts turn into bloody wars? Was Creon’s Law Necessary? Who is right ? Who won ? Who lost ? State law or the law of critical thinking? What does winning mean? are just a few of those reflections launched in the course of the story, as a downtime necessary to absorb the drama that is playing out before our eyes.
Suzanne Lebeau’s text, her way of writing about life while trusting the young spectators to whom it is addressed, is carried at arm’s length by the three actors. By Citlali Germé, this Antigone “small in the face of life which offers great challenges but immense in the face of fate”. By Sasha Samar, both narrator, but also Hémon, lover of Antigone, fair and solid in his back and forth between fiction and questioning, and by Ludger Côté as impassive and solitary Creon.
Marie-Ève Huot’s uncluttered staging also contributes to the solidity of the whole. Thanks to a thousand and one small details and its ingenuity, it evokes the drama without ever offering it head-on. Whether it is the struggle between the twins, invisible if not in the trembling bodies of Germé and Côté; the battle scene simulated by a red halo plunging over the extensive remains; the plague represented by immense balls of multicolored black and white knitwear, or even this sand imprisoned in a plastic canvas to simulate a corpse transported by Haemon.
All this creative richness is carried by the music on stage which adds to the dramatic load, but also by the moments of silence that the spectators, absorbed, respected until the end.