Antigone was originally produced in Paris in 1942, when France was occupied and part of Hitler’s Europe. The play depicts an authoritarian regime which mirrors the predicament of the French people of the time. Based on Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy, Antigone which was first performed in Athens in the 5th century BC, its theme was nevertheless topical. For in Antigone’s faithfulness to her dead brother and his proper burial and her reiterated No! to the dictator Creon, the French audience saw its own resistance to the German occupation. The Germans allowed the play to be performed presumably because they found Creon’s arguments for dictatorship so convincing. The play is regularly performed and studied around the world.

Anouilh is a poet, but not a poet of words: he is a poet of words-acted, of scenes-set, of players-performing Peter Brook