«For the ages and for right now»: un’analisi dell’Antigone (2019) di Merlynn Tong, con un’intervista all’autrice

The article analyzes one of the most recent adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone, written in 2019 by the young Australian author and actress, Merlynn Tong. After providing a first synthetic evaluation of the reasons for continuity and innovation of the work (among which, the adoption of a Creon woman), the essay explores the drama, scene by scene, studying the operation carried out on the hypotext through a precise comparison with it. The conclusions are then subsequently summarized, with particular attention on the one hand to the actualizing solutions regarding the story of the external space (the city), but above all showing how – while depicting Antigone as an activist (according to a very common redefinition in the rewritings of recent years) – the focus of the drama is the picture of the human bonds between the characters and their suffering: an emotional approach to the tragedy, distant from the eminently political rewritings that the myth of Antigone has developed since the twentieth century. In the Appendix to the article, a short interview with the author is given.