Antigone im Amazonas

‘Much is monstrous, yet nothing / more monstrous than man,’ reads a passage in Sophocles’ Antigone. It is a sentiment that was echoed in the opening speech of the 2020 Wiener Festwochen, held online by Brazilian actor and indigenous activist Kay Sara. Three pandemic years later, in keeping with Antigone’s revolt against Creon’s tyranny of injustice, Kay Sara and her allies rise to a full-scale indictment in this tragedy rewrite by Milo Rau. In Brazil, where around 10 per cent of the population owns 80 per cent of the land, the Landless Movement (MST) campaigns for radical land reform. As a chorus of the landless, they look down and comment on the events unfolding onstage between Creon, Antigone, her betrothed, Haemon, and his mother, Eurydice, from the huge video screen. In the final part of his Trilogy of Ancient Myths, which began with Orestes in Mosul (at the Wiener Festwochen in 2019), Milo Rau retells the story of right and wrong as a bloody clash between traditional wisdom and global turbo-capitalism