STRATFORD, Conn.--What a whale of a tale is the story of Antigone! It was momentous and relevant 2500 years ago; it is momentous and relevant today; and, if civilization should happen to survive 2500 years more, it will doubtless be momentous and relevant still.

The tale was given its first great artistic shaping by Sophocles, whose dramatization remains the best known. Although his Antigone concludes the story presented in Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colouns, it was written before the other two; it is, in fact, the next-to-earliest of his surviving works. Early or not, it is a supreme master-piece, fully deserving of the first prize that it copped; and it contains a higher proportion of lyric writing than any of his other works.

Burial, then Death

Now once again, thanks to the American Shakespeare Festival, we are able to witness the stunning story of Antigone, who, believing that the soul of an unburied body was condemned to restless wandering throughout eternity, defied the order of King Creon, her uncle, by scattering earth on the rotting corpse of her slain brother Polyneices, with the full knowledge that the penalty for so doing was death.

But the version currently on stage is not that of Sophocles; it is the modern one of Anouilh--who is, with Beckett, one of the two greatest play-wrights of our time in the French language. Anouilh did, however, work from the play of Sophocles, though the result can in no wise be called a translation. In fact, Anouilh's play contains only one line that is an exact rendering from Sophocles. Anouilh preserved the actual story intact, but subjected the entire affair to a deep and thorough rethinking. If he was unable to equal the lofty grandeur of the original, he nonetheless did create one of the supreme French plays of our century.

Anouilh has been criticized for daring to alter certain features of Sophocles' play. But he had every right to do so. After all, Sophocles' own version of the tale was far from the first, and contained its own innovations. Before Sophocles, Antigone was supported in her act by other young maidens; and she was defying, not Creon and his guards, but the corporate decree of the entire Theban Senate. Sophocles had the inspired idea of placing Antigone in glorious isolation; and, as Sir Donald F. Tovey said in a quite different context, "Nothing in human life and history is much more thrilling or of more ancient and universal experience than the antithesis of the individual and the crowd." It was Sophocles, too, who had Antigone affianced to Creon's son Haemon. Other changes, too, were rung in antiquity. For instance, in Euripides' Antigone, of which only parts survive, a tragic outcome was avoided through the outlandish intercession of the god Dionysus, and, incredibly, Antigone and Haemon were happily married. So a strong tradition of artistic license existed from the beginning.

It is easy to understand Anouilh's interest in this subject matter. The French have always enjoyed dramas that give free play to philosophical disputation. And modern French dramatists, with the shining example of Racine before them, have been especially drawn to ancient Greek legends. The trend started at the turn of the century with Gide, who wrote stage pieces about Philoctetes, Prometheus, and Oedipus. Montherlant turn-to Pasipha*e, and Cocteau dramatized Antigone, Orpheus, and Oedipus. Claudel turned to Proteus, and did a version of Aeschylus' entire Orestes trilogy. Giraudoux turned to Amphitryon, Electra, and the Trojan War, while Sartre refashioned the Oresteia in his Les Mouches. As part of this movement, then, Anouilh wrote not only Antigone, but plays about Eurydice and Medea.

Antigone holds a special historical position, too. Written in 1942 and first performed in 1944, it was the most important stage work to emerge during the Occupation. It was widely construed as a political allegory, the conflict between Antigone and Creon being viewed as that between the R*esistance and the collaborationists. The French people were divided, however, into those who found the play "fascist" and those who found it "antifascist." Thus Anouilh would seem to have achieved a good deal of the "negative capability" that Keats attributed to Shakespeare. And it is true that Anouilh did not stack the cards strongly in Antigone's favor as Sophocles had; a number of people even stoutly maintain that Creon is the true protagonist and hero of the work.

Ancient, But Up-to-date

Anouilh underlined the contemporaneity of his play by employing a good deal of low-level speech such as the ancient tragedians avoided, and by specifying the use of modern dress in performance. The current Stratford production is as up-to-date as today's newspapers. It is framed by the on-stage playing of a rock 'n' roll combo, with a bunch of teenagers frugging away (including Antigone's sister Ismene, in a yellow and black miniskirt). The Greek chorus has been reduced to a single commentator by Anouilh (as Shakespeare had done with the Chorus in Henry V); but here he is, as cleanly and expertly played by Tom Aldredge, an ambulating master-of-ceremonies, hosting the activities with a hand-microphone that feeds amplifying speakers on the wall, and occasionally smoking a cigarette. At one point he is irresistibly compelled to desert objectivity and intrude himself into the action in a vain attempt to change Creon's mind and save Antigone. It is a stunning moment, and here Aldredge quite rightly leaves his microphone aside. At another point, the Chorus holds up the play in order to give the audience a speech about Anouilh's view of the essence of tragedy. This was a frightfully dangerous thing for the playwright to do, but he pulled it off and Aldredge makes it work admirably.

High praise is owed to director Jerome Kilty '49, who has taken a clear stand and then seen to everything with an unflaggingly sure hand. There are those who consider the tale primarily a battle of the sexes. I have always thought this a silly view; Antigone could very well have been a boy, and the story would still have been perfectly valid. Kilty has chosen to play up the conflict of the generations--it's the teenagers versus their uncomprehending elders, who have made a mess of the world and deserve to be called to account. It is clear that Kilty has on his mind such things as our peace marchers, draft-card burners, and Berkeley protestudents. There is a 1967 ring about Antigone's outburst (in Lewis Galantiere's generally viable but not wholly satisfactory translation): "I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl."

Well-Matched Pair

The chief conflict in the play remains that between Conscience and Compromise. Although Antigone and Creon both appear in the earlier part of the work, they confront each other face to face only in the second half--and this tug-of-war is the heart of the play. In this production, the two principals are a worthy match for each other: Maria Tucci and Morris Carnovsky. Carnovsky is of course a known quantity. But I had never been especially struck by Miss Tucci's endeavors. Her Antigone, however, is miles above anything she has done before; it is in fact a performance of the first rank. Anouilh has lined up the arguments and swung his pendulum pretty equally, and the two Festival players interact magnificently on the same high level. The result is nothing short of electrifying.

In Sophocles' play it is primarily the gods and divine law that activate Antigone's conscience and drive her to her great act of defiance. Anouilh, however, watered down the religious overtones; he was more concerned with worldly power and man-made political laws. He made the clash essentially a temperamental one between two intensely human beings; and both Miss Tucci and Carnovsky are wondrously human.

Miss Tucci spends much of her time in an azure pants-suit, besmirched with the dirt she has used to bury her rotting brother. She projects artfully the ardor of the 19-year-old idealistic girl, one conscious of her age and nostalgic for her childhood ("Oh, it's just that I'm a little young still for what I have to go through."). And when she sits down and looks out into the audience, her beautifully sculptured expression sends one's mind back to thoughts of Greta Garbo. Her Antigone is proud and courageous and noble. But instead of a Sophoclean serenity she is seized with anguish. She is not so concerned with the eternal repose of Polyneices as with the right to dissent when conscience dictates. She tells Creon, "I am not here to understand.... I am here to say no to you, and die." But she is not against Creon personally so much as against the society he represents.