The play has been adapted for many modern contexts, including Northern Ireland and South Africa. In fact, productions nowadays tend to come down in favour of Antigone and her self-sacrificing intransigence. The philosopher Hegel saw this as the quintessence of true tragedy: not a conflict between good and evil, but between right and right. He had brought an army against his native city and Kreon, in these politically volatile times, wants his corpse left for the dogs as an exemplary desecration. Antigone defies her uncle Kreon, the new ruler of Thebes, by burying her brother Polyneices. Sophocles’ play is still the most powerful ever written about the conflict between our obligations to the state and our duty to the ties of kinship. It doesn’t seem to grow old: Kane’s writing has a horribly vivid energy, and the atrocities it depicts, depressingly, take on fresh resonance for each generation that discovers it. Famously described as a “disgusting feast of filth”, Blasted was seen by critics as a puerile attempt to shock, and anointed as the classic example of provocative, Nineties in-yer-face theatre. The world of the play – and its conventional theatrical form – is then blasted apart, becoming a war zone: a soldier bursts in, explosions go off, and short scenes of grim horror unfold (stage directions include “he eats the baby”). Sarah Kane’s debut, written while she was a student, features a nasty tabloid journalist holed up in a Leeds hotel with a much younger woman, whom he sexually abuses. Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy on Oppenheimer: ‘There’s nothing bigger’.The true story of the brilliant, complicated female figures behind Oppenheimer.Oppenheimer and the cult of the brainy blockbuster.This extended sequence is characteristic of Churchill, finding a brilliantly absurdist way of attacking the pernicious myth, beloved of politicians, that there is a simple divide between virtue and evil, “them” and “us”. The “natural goodness of deer has come through” says someone else, “you can see it in their soft brown eyes”. “The cats have come in on the side of the French,” someone says earnestly. Partisan brutality has now spread from humans to the animal and mineral world.
TOP GIRLS PLAY SET IN 1970S SERIES
Then, by a series of surreal jumps, the play escalates into a blackly hilarious vision of cosmic warfare. It sounds as if she has espied a bloody act of ethnic cleansing the older woman stonewalls unctuously. In the first, Joan, a young girl who can’t get to sleep, is quizzing her aunt about what she has just accidentally witnessed. It unfolds in three episodes that shelve steeply. Far Away is a twisted fairy tale that demonstrates her matchless gift for merging the apocalyptic and the fantastical. Today, at the age of 80, the British playwright continues startlingly to reinvent herself. Caryl Churchill has been called the Picasso of modern playwrights.
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