Week 15: Classwork

Wednesday

After blocking through half of the Creon and Antigone scene last week, we continued to work on the last section so that we would complete the scene this week. We worked through the staging of each section first. We wanted to show the power exchange that happens throughout this scene and so we started the second half of the scene with Creon kneeling in front of Antigone which shows that Antigone has the power at this point but then Creon stands and begins to regain his rightful position. He puts her in her position when he throws her to the floor.

This point is completing juxtaposing to the image that was created on stage moments before. Throughout the whole of the scene we see the power struggle between the two becoming more and more relevant and also visible to the audience and both characters are being to lose their temper with each other and they have both come to their last resort in trying to persuade the other in to doing what they want. 

At this junction in the scene we wanted to reiterate the elements of Metatheatre and remind the audience that we are actors on stage and so we got Antigone to get up and the actress character to be shown and so she would be feeling disgusted by the mud that she has just been thrown into and she will say her line out to the audience: "I don't want to do this. It's alright for you. But I'm not here to understand, I'm here to say no to you."  She points out her role to the audience; to say no to Creon. And then she returns back to her Antigone role and the scene continues. I feel like does this not only create tension between the audience and the actress as they are tense as to why she has come out of role and to why she has openly admitted that she doesn't want to play this role anymore but it also shows how severe the consequences of her actions are; this actress genuinely thinks that she is going to die because she has been cast as Antigone.

One of the most challenging things of this scene for me, is the build up of Antigone becoming crazy. We needed to show the build up of her anger and show that she has other emotions as well. In the last section of the scene, it is the part where Antigone has learnt the truth about her brothers and Creon has told her that "Happiness is just a word eh." This triggers Antigone as her happiness is completely juxtaposing with what Creon thinks happiness is. Antigone's happiness is her being killed over her fighting for her brothers whereas Creon's happiness is to keep Antigone safe and to keep Thebes from having any uprisings against him.