I really love Anouilh's Antigone, but the other plays I read in this collection (Eurydice and Romeo and Jeanette) didn't do much for me.

Anouilh's Antigone is one of the most influential modern reworkings of Sophocles' play, and what I find interesting is that it more or less reverses the roles of Antigone and Creon vis-a-vis irrationality. In this version, Antigone has no real illusion that she is justified in burying her brother, but essentially admits that it is compulsive, while Creon has a very pragmatic and rational justification for ruling, and for ruling the way he does. In keeping with the tradition of Oedipus at Colonus, Creon asserts that both Polyneices and Eteocles were gangsters who would kill their father and/or one another (and made attempts to do just that) to get power, and that after their mutual slaughter Creon just picked one of the bodies and declared it Eteocles the hero, while the other body became Polyneices the villain. I'm not totally sure what to make of Creon in this play, particularly knowing that it debuted in Nazi-occupied France. I see Creon as essentially correct (which reflects retroactively into my reading of Sophocles' version), but I'm not sure if he is supposed to represent a collaborator/Vichy government and were supposed to agree with Antigone or what.

This play sounds like the voices of educated British schoolgirls in the beginning; I was a little surprised to find that Jean Anouilh was a French national. I suppose the difference between British and French is not so great, but somehow I always thought the cadences were different, to say nothing of the cadences of girls from Greece two thousand years ago. But this is written in English and it is ravishingly comprehensible and utterly contemporary.

What a joy is this play as written by Anouilh. The canny cunning of a young girl who makes an earth-shattering decision and refuses to be swayed is here in its entirety. Of course she is right, Antigone, taking the moral course, but none is as fierce in her determination, and none so brave. Antigone deflects and protects The Nurse and Ismene, and tries to do the same for poor, dead Polynices.

Did you notice Ismene describes Antigone as having a different kind of beauty: “…it’s always you that the little boys turn to look back at when they pass us in the street. And when you go by, the little girls stop talking, They stare and stare at you, until we’ve turned a corner.” This description captures that difference also between Lila and Lena in Elena Ferrante’s novel of Neapolitan Italy. Antigone is fatalistic, as is Lila.

The great wisdom Anouilh brings to this work is that melodrama works because one is never sure of the outcome, and the strength of the argument passes from one character to another, depending on circumstance. With tragedy on the other hand, the end is preordained, and therefore is calming. There is nothing to be done except play out the roles.

I especially liked what Anouilh did with the story of Eteocles and Polynices. I have no idea is this is part of the myth or something Anouilh added. I won’t spoil it for those of you who haven’t learned the myth yet, but this added to my sense of this whole thing as soap opera par excellence. Just as one thinks one has the characters pegged, up comes a new wrinkle that makes them out to be opportunists or really thoughtful and self-sacrificing beneath the visible outlines of their actions.

Gorgeous piece of work. Won’t finish the rest of the plays right now, I’m afraid. Bad timing.

You can see my review of Anouilh's Antigone here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

First of the collection I have reviewed the individual plays this book was great and I will read more Mermaid Drama Books
and the other two volumes of Anouilh plays.

This book of plays begs the question, how many times can one playwrights ask, "Does it hurt to die?" and how many different answers can he give?

Antigone: 4 stars

Eurydice: 3 stars

The Ermine: 2 stars

Apparently Goodreads doesn't have a separate listing for The Ermine like there's a listing for the first two. So, while I haven't finished this collection yet, I'm marking it as read for today to mark when I finished The Ermine. The last two plays their own listings.

Obviously, I wasn't much a fan of The Ermine. I do love a good murder build-up but only when I'm actually attached to someone in the story. There wasn't much to attach myself to in this case - Monime is mostly wishy-washy and never really decides what she thinks or wants, Frantz is a grating obsessive basket case, Philippe is okay but isn't enough to save the play, Florentine is just there, the Bentzes are... um, uncomfortable. The tension and suspense was there, but emotional connection wasn't.

Eurydice is a wonderful play on the myth of Orpheus that sets in modern time. For me it was a heart wrenching read that insprired some very bad poetry on my part. That aside it is still a great play that I would love to see staged sometime. Also, in this collection is his version of Antigone. In Annoulih's play, she is fated to be a victim of a world gone amuck where her uncle has become a tryant and won't let her bury her beloved brother. Love, as in Eurydice, becomes the trigger. Now this play I did see live and I can tell you it is wonderful and powerful on stage. Hopefully Annouilh's plays will again be staged.

Fine selection by this unique author.

Excellent collection of plays, Antigone being my favorite.

آنتيگون：آره،من دخترم.چقدربابت دختربودنم گريه کردم!

آدميزاد تنها به خودش وفاداراست وبس.
کرئون：هيچ چيزبه اندازه ناگفته ها حقيقت نداره.توهم گرچه خيلي ديراين ها رو مي فهمي،زندگي مثل يه کتاب دوست داشتنيه،مثل يه بچست که بغل دستمون داره بازي مي کنه، مثل ابزاريه که مي گيريم دستمون وازش استفاده مي کنيم،مثل يه نيمکت که شبا دم خونمون روش استراحت ميکنيم.توبازهم از من متنفرميشي،ولي باکشف اين موضوع ميبيني که اين حرف تسکين مضحکيه براي پيري،زنذگي شايدهم واقعاچيزي غير خوشبختي نباشه .

I knew very little about Jean Anouilh before picking up this old Hill and Wang paperback collection of five of his plays--my main reason for grabbing it in the first place was a desire to get better acquainted with dramatists in general, and this fifty-cent, library-sale discard looked like a good way to do that. It probably wasn't until after I bought it, and after doing a little bit of research, that I learned anything about Anouilh--which still wasn't much: Antigone seemed to be the play he was best known for, and that play--a retelling of the last of the Theban cycle--was associated with the French Resistance.

Being of a certain age, the French resistance against the occupation of Nazi Germany holds a kind of popular appeal for me--never mind that my impressions of it are more than likely a lot of uninformed nonsense. So the idea of retelling this already powerful play and adapting it to the (then) contemporary circumstances seemed very intriguing. Unfortunately, this translation by Lewis Galantière did not live up to my expectations--and I make a specific point of the translation because, as I was to find out later, (after doing a little more research), that Galantière took it upon himself to remove some of the ambiguity inherent in the original, and thus to make the play more palatable for American audiences. (In the course of my research, I found a thesis posted on line where the author addresses this very charge. I found it interesting, though it might have a limited appeal. Anyone interested can view it here: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/rws_etd/docu... SURVIVING ANTIGONE: ANOUILH, ADAPTATION AND THE ARCHIVE by Katelyn J. Buis)

At any rate, there is no doubt that Anouilh found the translation troubling. An aspect that I found fascinating was that, according to Buis, the original audience for Antigone, a mixture of German officers and French citizens, understood the play to be Pro-Vichy or Pro-Resistance, depending on which ever view they already held. In other words, the play's ambiguity allowed for each audience member to imprint their own views on the larger circumstances onto the stage. Galantière's translation, on the other hand, was an attempt to place the play firmly in the pro-resistance camp, presumably with the idea that, now that the war was over, people wouldn't want to be confronted with this kind of uncertainty.

It might be a mistake to draw too many conclusions from the relative success of each version, as there are too many variables to keep track of, but it does make me wonder when the American production folded rather rapidly and the French production was a resounding success. I also began to wonder about the translation I read because, after finishing, I was ambivalent about it in general. Without spending a lot more money than I'm inclined to, it's doubtful I'll ever find a French version of this play with which to compare, though I would like to see just how much difference there is between the two. Buis, in her thesis, gives some examples, though not enough for me to be sure if the difference is as much as is reported. There is, too, the fact that I have not seen the play staged--and that might make all the difference.

As to the play itself--it's been a long time since I read Sophocles, but Anouilh's take on it made, to me, a much more positive character out of Cleon, the tyrant of Thebes, who gives the order that the body of Polynices--the son of Oedipus who fought his brother Eteocles for control of Thebes--remain on the battlefield where it fell, without the proper burial rites, which would consign him to wander restlessly throughout eternity. Antigone, the sister, is committed to seeing her brother buried, and is willing to risk death in order to do the right thing. As the crux of the play revolves around the question of submission to authority, I think it's easy to see how this subject could be adapted to many different situations, and despite questions about the translation, it still seems to me that there is some ambiguity involved, as I found myself sympathetic to Cleon, seeing Anouilh's Antigone as a somewhat self-absorbed and melodramatic. This could very well be a function of my age though.

In the course of my research, I also found that three other plays by Anouilh besides Antigone are listed as part of Harold Bloom's Western Canon, two of which are included in this volume: Eurydice and The Rehearsal (the third, in another of Hill and Wang's paperback collections, is Beckett). Eurydice is a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in a contemporary setting, and that one and the others (The Ermine, The Rehearsal and Romeo and Jeannette) have an insistent theme of the difficulties between lovers. Anouilh resists easy answers, his characters are not stock. Much of the drama tends to center around two people who find an instant attraction for one another, but then must find a way to accept the flawed (sometimes sordid) past of their new lover. That although this new love is something greater than either one has ever experienced, one of them (usually the male) feels the need to make the other's past conform to this same ideal, which it fails miserably to do.

Anouilh's dialogue does not seem to suffer from the same kind of 'staginess' that I find in a lot of dramas I read, though there is some. And sometimes it can be melodramatic. But I thought it was well worth reading, even though I was a little underwhelmed with Antigone. At this age, I often saw the difficulties of the characters in a rather unforgiving light--I felt like saying 'all this that you are so worried about doesn't matter!', but try telling that to any young person engaged in an emotion-driven affair. I've become the sort of person who says, 'yes, I was that way once too, but you'll think differently about it when you're my age'. So take that into consideration. 3.5 stars

I only read Antigone and Romeo and Jeannette from this. Pretty good. Antigone was awesome.