Contemporary Antigone Productions and Publications.
The Germans owe me. I don’t owe them. They owe me Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. They owe me Aristophanes, Socrates, Aristotle. They took so much culture from us, and we never charged them interest for the inspiration—the divine madness they took from us. I mean, all those Romantics. Ask Goethe. Ask Hölderlin. Ask Schiller. And what about their philosophers. They learned how to think with us. Where were their souls nourished—in whose tradition. Ask Nietzsche. Ask Schopenhauer. Ask Heidegger. They took everything from us. And from our temples, they stole our art. Did we ever charge them interest? No, because we bury our dead—and with them our debts. We nourish talents. We don’t bury alive what is dead. Even our god, our highest god, Zeus, was so fertile that he gave birth twice. From his head to Athena, and from his thigh to Dionysus. Aren’t we generous? Watch out. Don’t even try to victimize a Greek. We don’t become victims. We become heroines. You bury me alive—and look what I do—I create a tragedy for you. I give you hell…
ANTIGONE
(Scene from PUTINOIKA by Giannina Braschi)
Contemporary Antigone Adaptations
Alphabetical by Title (AI)
- Antigonick by Anne Carson
- Antigonick by Anne Carson (2012): This experimental verse play follows the traditional clash over Polyneikes’ forbidden burial while highlighting the characters’ meta-awareness of their own tragic fates, utilizing a unique handwritten text layout with minimal punctuation and integrated illustrations.
2. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
- Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (2017): This political thriller transports the myth to modern London as a realist novel that shifts between five distinct perspectives, reshaping the narrative around a British Muslim family caught between state law and an extremist cell.
3. Putinoika by Giannina Braschi
- Putinoika by Giannina Braschi (2024): This mixed-genre epic tragedy is set in the Putin and Trump era of “pollution, collusion, and delusion” during the Covid19 pandemic. This contemporary Antigone refuses to bury her brother if it means burying herself alive. An excerpt of Antigone was published here by The Poetry Foundation in 2022.
4. The Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heaney
- The Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heaney (2004): This formal verse play was designed for the stage. Creon’s dialogue mirrors post-9/11 military state logic.
5. The Story of Antigone by Ali Smith
- The Story of Antigone by Ali Smith (2013): This prose novella retells the traditional sequence of events for younger audiences by utilizing a unique animal fable framing device narrated from the perspective of a witty crow.
Modern Antigone Productions
- Antigone in Ferguson (Theater + Film)
Conceived by Bryan Doerflies and Theater of War Productions in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, this contemporary Antigone production strips back traditional staging to present a dramatic reading of Sophocles’ text combined with a powerhouse gospel and classical choir composed of activists, police officers, and community members. Polyneices’ unburied body serves as a visceral parallel to Michael Brown’s body being left in the street for hours after his death, anchoring profound community panel discussions on race, trauma, and police brutality.
2. Antigone by Kamila Shamsie / Adapted for Theater Stage
Based on Shamsie’s 2017 modern novel Home Fire and adapted for international stages, this contemporary Antigone translates the myth into the context of the contemporary war on terror. Aneeka is a British-Pakistani woman living in London whose brother, Parvaiz (Polyneices), is recruited into ISIS; he dies in Istanbul. When the British Home Secretary (Kreon) strips Parvaiz of his citizenship and refuses to allow his body to return to Britain for burial, Aneeka flies to Pakistan to wage a public, media-saturated campaign to bury her brother.
3. Antigone (2019 Film / TV Broadcast)
Directed by Sophie Deraspe, this cinematic adaptation won Canada’s Best Motion Picture at the Canadian Screen Awards and was widely broadcast on television networks, resetting the tragedy in contemporary Montreal among a family of Algerian immigrants. Antigone is a teenager whose family fled Algeria; when her brother is shot by police during an arrest and her brother, Polynice, faces deportation for assaulting an officer in the aftermath, Antigone orchestrates a prison break to switch places with him. This contemporary Antigone production shifts Kreon’s authoritarian power from a king to the faceless bureaucracy of the modern judicial, immigration, and penal systems.
4. Antigone at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre (2022, London)
Adapted by Inua Ellams (Barbershop Chronicles), this contemporary Antigone adaptation was staged in London’s open-air theater against a backdrop of modern urban warfare and authoritarian state control. Set in a sleek, dystopian metropolis, Creon is reimagined as a slick, media-savvy politician obsessed with public relations, national security, and branding, while Ellams infuses the dialogue with contemporary spoken-word poetry to focus on how modern states use digital surveillance and citizenship laws to strip individuals of their humanity and dignity.
5. Antigone by the National Theatre of Greece / International Tours (2022–2023)
Directed by Cezaris Graužinis, this highly physical, minimalist production toured ancient theaters and modern venues internationally, deliberately staging the play in the immediate shadow of the global pandemic. Instead of focusing purely on politics, this production emphasized the psychological weight of isolation and the breakdown of societal rituals; Creon’s edict banning the burial is treated like an extreme, cold emergency state decree, presenting the chorus as an anxious, masked populace trapped between their fear of state biopolitics (government control over bodies) and their deep spiritual need for communal mourning.
Antigone 3000 Anakainōsis (Painting Series)
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup:
albertz benda gallery presents Antigone 3000 (Anakainōsis), Alexandra Grant’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. On view from May 21 through July 03, 2026, the show features new paintings and works on paper from Grant’s long-term investigation into Sophocles’ myth of Antigone.
Begun in 2014 as a series of large-scale works on paper combining painting, collage and wax rubbings, the Antigone 3000 works have morphed into paintings on canvas through the artist’s use of screen printing of text and using a squeegee to manipulate paint across the surface.
Throughout, Grant employs a visual language that translates the Greek myth into painting: lines representing the rule of law; pours and splashes to show the more ecstatic, expressionistic messiness of real life; and, interspersed throughout this painterly language, the phrase “I was born to love not to hate.” This line from Sophocles’ play is sometimes mirrored, sometimes fractured, or even partially obscured within the compositions. Antigone utters it as she stands up to her uncle, who refuses to give Antigone’s brother Polynices an equal burial after a war of succession, and for which she is sentenced to death. Grant’s paintings map the characters, their motivations, desires and interactions as a painted choreography.
Like many before her, Grant turned to the story of Antigone to help make sense of the political, cultural and personal contexts of her lifetime, the phrase ultimately becoming a personal mantra. Now Grant asks us to contemplate with her: what happens if the mantra works?
For these final works of the series, the artist chose the title Anakainōsis – a Greek term that speaks of renewal: not in the additive sense of self-improvement, but of the possibility of reaching a higher, positive state through the destruction of the past self. The lines, pours and texts disintegrate into explosive fireworks of form and color: the end is a new beginning. Antigone, in dying, achieved immortality as a character, made new by each generation. In her 2022 poem “Antigone,” Giannina Braschi wrote:
“It is the body politic persisting, insisting it has a body of work and muscles to train—and trains to catch—and it wants to rise in love—and raise humanity to a higher quality of itself—and it doesn’t want to leave us without a body of work to complete its masterpiece. Don’t even try to take Antigone from gone. Anti is the body of work that doesn’t want to leave everything unfinished before it is time to go away. And when gone comes to take anti away from body—body will manifest itself as a protest of antagonism—and contradiction—contrasting gone with the spirit of rain and wind—and flesh with earth and fire. Here, keep the torch alive!”
Contemporary Antigone, Antigone adaptations, Modern Antigone productions, Modern Antigone texts, Anne Carson’s Antigone, Antigonick