Since their creation, Sophocles’ tragedies Antigone and Electra have inspired many poets and play writers to approach in very different ways themes like love and hatred, justice and injustice, and state-supporting reasonability versus individual “unreasonability”. Both plays deal not so much with an interpretation of historical events, with the actual events, but rather with emotional processes: in Antigone and Electra and Clytemnestra, Ismene and Chrysothemis.
Hölderlin’s poetic approach to Antigone’s language shows the despair of a young woman who rebels until the last consequences and against the restraints of her conscience. The naked physicality of the language used by Hofmannsthal’s Electra targets ‘common’ human feelings such as pain and revenge -not so much a play, but rather "a catastrophe, not a body, but a devastated head on a key”.
With: Dörte Lyssewski, Anne Ratte-Polle, Pascale Schiller and Almut Zilcher
Director: Werner Schroeter
Stage and Costumes Supplier: Alberte Barsacq
Dramaturgy: Monika Keppler, Sabine Zielke
Music: Sir Henry
Light Design: Torsten König
