Antigone

Sombre, sparsely written, but carefully calibrated to resonate with a modern audience, Merlynn Tong’s version of Sophocles’ Antigone is a melancholy myth about the moral imperative to stand up to injustice.

Wendy Kweh’s condescending, icily calm Creon makes a quietly monstrous authority figure. Publicly calling for law and order and railing against nebulous "foreign" enemies, she epitomises the cynical nationalism many leaders turn to when they’re out of meaningful ideas. Her confrontation with Antigone is the show’s strongest scene – a tense, escalating sequence of power-plays between two formidable, but destructively inflexible, women.

Adeola Yemitan – who gave a ferocious performance in the National Youth Theatre’s dynamic Animal Farm earlier this year – is strong as the titular daughter of Oedipus. Her Antigone is visibly torn between grief and indignation, youth and maturity, fiercely determined but given to nervous jitters and petulant huffing.

Meanwhile, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’ Ismene is a ghostly presence drifting through the performance, all but paralysed by her conflicting loyalties. Observing the action more often than becoming involved, she also serves as a chorus, powerfully singing a number of bleak and emotive melodies composed by Blasio Kavuma.

Director Dawn Walton sets an intentionally stately pace, creating an atmosphere of hushed, building menace as the characters march towards their fates. Simon Kenny’s design sites the action in a brutalist concrete bunker with raised galleries and yawning tunnels radiating off a central chamber, simultaneously evoking the lonely corridors of power in war-torn Thebes, and the austere tombs awaiting the plays’ protagonists.