Antigone

Jean Anouilh is one of the foremost French writers of the 20th century Now regarded as a classic text Antigone is a set text for WJEC GCE Drama and Theatre Studies Contains expert notes on the author's life and work, historical and political background to the play, a glossary of difficult words and phrases and questions for study

"Antigone" was originally produced in Paris in 1942, when France was an occupied nation and part of Hitler's Europe. The play depicts an authoritarian regime and the play's central character, the young Antigone, mirrored the predicament of the French people in the grips of tyranny.'Anouilh is a poet, but not of words: he is a poet of words-acted, of scenes-set, of players-performing' Peter Brook Jean Anouilh, one of the foremost French playwrights of the twentieth century, replaced the mundane realist works of the previous era with his innovative dramas, which exploit fantasy, tragic passion, scenic poetry and cosmic leaps in time and space. Antigone, his best-known play, was performed in 1944 in Nazi-controlled Paris and provoked fierce controversy. In defying the tyrant Creon and going to her death, Antigone conveyed to Anouilh's compatriots a covert message of heroic resistance; but the author's characterisaation of Creon also seemed to exonerate Marshal Petain and his fellow collaborators. More ambivalent than his ancient model, Sophocles, Anouilh uses Greek myth to explore the disturbing moral dilemmas of our times. Commentary and notes by Ted Freeman.