The Festival. Antigone.

Antigone.

Probably the finest example of how sometimes the classics just don’t translate into our modern day and age. I do not deny the importance of Sophocles, Euripides or Aeschylus’s work, giving performance the legs it needed to develop into what theatre is today, but these guys are not on my Top 8 Myspace Friends. (side note: Aristophanes is on my Top 8, right beside Homer, but not before him).

Maybe I’m biased. I was truly exhausted when I went in to see this, and I fell asleep basically whenever anybody talked for longer than seven minutes. They could not hold my consciousness. The actors shouted their lines, indicating with grand gestures of their arms. I could tell the scene was dramatic because their faces looked about to cry, or full of rage. The Chorus had something going for them, a uniform group of women in masks that actively told the story as well as interacted with the characters in it, but they too were also boring, and sang at points where I know the text called for it, but really did not come across making any sense.

The only other masked character was Tiresias, the blind prophet. It was a superb mask, very creepy and twisted with a speakerphone shaped mouth, so we could hear every cryptic word. But a mask? No other major character is in a mask. This did not fit.

But truly, what do you care what I thought. I kept falling asleep.

At one point, I was startled awake by a noise. The actors were having a quiet moment of dramatics, I think Antigone slowly exiting stage right, heading towards her death sentence. Whitesnake began laughing at me.

I had farted.

And it had not been muffled or concealed at all. I do not know at what amplitude the release reached, but it certainly caused a fair amount of amusement and embarrassment before I started paying attention to the play again and consequently nodded off.