Jean Anouilh’s 1942 adaptation of Sophocles’ play Antigone is one of his best known works. In this modern classic, the body of Polynices, Antigone’s brother, has been ordered to remain unburied by Creon, the new king of Thebes. Antigone’s faithfulness to her dead brother and his proper burial, and her defiance of the dictator Creon, seals her fate. Originally produced in Paris during the Nazi occupation, Anouilh’s Antigone was seen by the French as theatre of the resistance and by the Germans as an affirmation of authority.

Anouilh’s version of Antigone, translated here by Christopher Nixon tackles themes such as tragedy, meta-theatre, the idealism of youth, the compromises of adulthood, the duel between morality and politics, and the choices and uncertainties of life in a complex, non black and white world.