Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Rewritings, especially of classical texts, often come with certain ideologies that mark them out from past narratives that they reimagine. Such works provide new contexts for viewing the past in a way that speaks to the present realities to which they are directed. Mark Fleishman and Magnet Theatre’s Antigone (not quite/not quiet), a reconstruction of Sophocles’ Antigone, is one such example which reconfigures the classic tale in an exciting way that speaks to new audiences in South Africa and hopefully beyond. Performed against the background of the rape and brutal murder of an undergraduate student of the University of Cape Town and renewed xenophobic attacks of foreign nationals by some angry, disillusioned South African youth during the last quarter of 2019, the play re-presents Sophocles’ story in three frames and media, in such a way that each stands apart and are yet integrated by a common theme of lamentation, grief, and despair. Whereas Antigone has always been recruited in the postcolonial world to challenge repressive governments and to address the abuse of power, Antigone (not quite/not quiet) uses the theatre to reflect about postcolonial failures that encourage violence, social dystopia and the evasive logic of the political class, as well as the stark reality of the multiple, situational, individual (and collective) and paradoxical complexity of being citizens of the Rainbow country, of being members of a “home,” but also being unable to feel some form of “at-homeness.”