"Tragedy," says the Chorus of Jean Anouilh's Antigone, "is clean"--but the play itself belies this. For Anouilh, writing in 1944, the filth of politics and administration seemed more real than the antiseptic heroics of Sophoclean tragedy. Like the Frenchmen of the day his Thebans are all preoccupied with authority and sordid disorder, a preoccupation intensified in the English language version by Lewis Galantiere's consistent use of rough American slang.

Little in the play, in fact, is particularly clean: palace guards have become city cops, and Etiocles and Polyneices no longer represent vanquished good and triumphing evil; both were "a pair of blackguards." But in Anouilh's world it is the blackguards, or at least the politically committed, who ultimately survive. And, as the play develops, the survival of Creon--who capitulates to corruption so that he can "introduce a little order into this absurd kingdom"--becomes increasingly more interesting than the deaths of Antigone and Haemon.

Director John Hancock, fortunately, has recognized the importance of the unheroic king; and his giving the role to Paul Barstow has been one of his most intelligent directorial decisions to date. Mr. Barstow can deliver his lines with just the proper amount of quiet, stiff and confused earnestness. A "cook" in the "kitchen" of politics Antigone calls him; but he is not wholly contemptible--and Mr. Barstow makes him as much a king as he is a compromiser.

The part of Antigone is a much less sympathetic one: Anouilh has denied her any political heroism; and she must remain tense, unyielding, and yet believable in the face of Creon's eloquence and practical hopes. Maggie Ziskind's triumph is that she remains consistently believable. Antigone's loneliness, her anguish, her despertion--all these are capturd by Miss Ziskind's performance.

Daniel Seltzer's Chorus (the Greek group of elders has dwindled to a single tuxedoed commentator who bein harsh and unsparing tones that are properly sepulcomes a sort of auctor ex machina) introduces the play chral. As for the rest, Jane Quigley's nurse, though suffering from an unfeebled voice that sounds as if it has been produced by an excess of cotton, is quite wonderfully aged and querulous; and I would be unfeeling indeed if I failed to mention Theodore Kazanoff's First Guard, the very image of New York's Finest, with a wife and two kids at home.

The play's final assert is its set by Ian Strasfogel: great Bauhaus slats frame a room that, one suddenly realizes, is a great and unescapable cage. I would like to call it oppressive--meaning that as high praise.

After two weeks, it seems, Mr. Hancock and his company have discovered how good they can be when they try. Antigone is first-rate theatre.