Common backcloth: Fleishman’s Antigone (not quite/quiet) and Soyinka’s ‘The fourth stage’

Abstract

Dramatists and theatre makers are often drawn to Sophocles’ Antigone hence they reimagine and recruit the Attic tragedy to serve various political and aesthetic purposes. One of such reworkings of the ancient text is Mark Fleishman’s Antigone (not quite/quiet) which addresses grave issues of concern in post-apartheid South Africa. In this essay I will use a mythopoesis woven around Ògún, the Yoruba God of Warfare and Creativity, through Wole Soyinka’s essay, ‘The Fourth Stage’ and its broader relation to other cross-cultural aesthetics as an analytical strategy, to discuss Antigone (not quite/quiet) as a cross-cultural theatre production that engages despicable events such as sexual and gender-based violence and xenophobia in post-1994 South Africa. The essay will stress how ritual and theatre co-exist in the play and are useful to a productive engagement with unfavourable social circumstances in the country.