Antigone Exits

by Nina Segal

seen at the Minerva Theatre Chichester on 10 October 2026

Jeff James directs Nina Cassells as Antigone, Max Bennett as Creon, Anushka Chakravarti as Ismene, Brandon Bassir as Haemon, Lizzy Watts as Eurydice, Testimony Adegbite as the Messenger and Melody Chikakane Brown as Teiresias in Nina Segal's play Antigone Exits based on Sophocles's tragedy (5th century BCE).

The story of Antigone, daughter of King Oedipus of Thebes and Jocasta his mother and wife, and sister of two brothers who died fighting each other for the throne of Thebes after their father's abdication and death, remains essentially unchanged in this newest version of the play, but the formal structure of Sophocles's play - confrontations interspersed with choric interludes - is replaced by a studied modern informality, and references to the gods are replaced by more general appeals to moral imperatives.

There are no curtains in the Minerva Theatre so everything is revealed to the audience as soon as they enter the auditorium. For this production, designed. by Alex Lowe, there is a golden yellow floor, with some large rocks at the back supporting a quarter of a huge hollow white sphere which has a stark passageway at the back. Sitting perched in the sphere is the entire cast chatting quietly among themselves until the play begins.

The back story needs to be explained of course - not the full tale of Oedipus's woes, which would be too distracting, but the more recent strife between the brothers who could not agree on their arrangements for ruling the city as alternating kings, and who have killed each other in the resulting civil war. Their uncle Creon (their mother's brother) has taken control and decreed honourable burial for one brother (Eteocles the defender of the city) and effective desecration of the body of the other (Polynices, who attacked the city) . It is this decree to which Antigone objects, claiming that both brothers deserve respectful burial, even though her attempt to provide this rite will lead to her own death.

All this is economically managed by the cast taking up the story, the phrases moving from one speaker to the next, at the opening of the play. In fact, the device of the cast telling the story as well as being the characters within it persists throughout, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Often it seems as if the characters are just speaking their thoughts aloud in the middle of the action, which gives an immediacy to the dilemmas they are facing. In particular, Antigone's determination to honour Polynices drives her to an acceptance of her own death, which must be presented in a way that does not alienate the audience despite the overtones of recklessness and even self-indulgence that could hover round it. Nina Cassells largely maintains sympathy in this potentially difficult task.

Creon too must be comprehensible, not merely a despot issuing unreasonable decrees. Unfortunately his decision, which looks pragmatic at one level - honouring the defender but not the attacker - is highly questionable in other ways, but Creon is unable to face up to the problem he has caused until it is too late: for him political authority, once invoked, cannot be weakened by concessions, especially to one's own family. Both characters are intransigent, but perhaps in our modern world with its emphasis on the individual's right to live by her or his own lights, Antigone's personal passion is more compelling than Creon's more intellectual reasoning about the nature of political power.

The sense of impending doom is relentless, marked by a constant slow drumbeat (sound designed by Kieran Lucas), and visualised by a great circle of black fluid poured out over the yellow stage by Antigone symbolising her first attempt to honour her brother's body. The cast nimbly avoid treading in this mire until the sense of catastrophe is so intense that being stained with it can serve as a visual reminder of the spreading contamination which threatens Creon's attempt to draw a line under the chaos which has afflicted Thebes.

Inserted into the classical story are a series of interludes provided by most of the members of the cast, replacing the choric interludes of the original (which serve to comment on and generalise the action). These monologues, some of them powerful in themselves, are to some extent a distraction from the main thrust of the play. The Messenger speaks first with an account of the first dead body he saw, that of a fox, while playing with his brother. I thought that a messenger might well have had this experience as a young boy, and so was not prepared for Haemon's (or Brandon's) account of not knowing his father but imagining that a TV star might fit the role. Was this Brandon's experience - or is it what any actor taking the part of Haemon in this play would be given to say? Later interludes were even more intrusive, and some were arguably in poor taste. Antigone's claim that we are collectively cursed by our non-interventionist witness of modern atrocities, while extremely powerful in the midst of a play about the curse hanging over Thebes, was perilously close to hitting the symbolic point home with a sledgehammer. 

The story remains powerfully dramatic; the pared back visual style suited its universality; the cast was excellent; not every intervention by the author was successful.