The Burial at Thebes

Handcart Ensemble presents The Burial at Thebes, a version of Sophocles’ Antigone, by Seamus Heaney, originally commissioned by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre for its 2003 centenary season.

A Nobel Prize-winning poet, Heaney uses his mastery of poetic form to burnish the primal imagery in Sophocles’ words and infuse with vitality this classic drama of state authority colliding with duty to kin and a higher sense of justice. In this fall’s production, Heaney’s words are joined with an original, live choral score by Nathan Bowen, whose compositions for Handcart Ensemble’s Two Yeats Plays (Spring 2006) were recently nominated for a New York Innovative Theatre Award.

“[Heaney has] composed a poem full of brilliant strokes . . . He varies his rhythms ingeniously.” — Garry Wills, The New York Times Book Review

“In Heaney’s version, the drama is a quick, taut, invigorating read that promises to play well on the stage . . . Heaney’s vision of the ethical dilemma of ancient Thebes is lucidly rendered.” — Jamie James, Los Angeles Times

“This book is another example of how lucky our language is to have Seamus Heaney working in it . . . He consistently adds as much to our knowledge of the original as he does to our view of our own age.” — Tom Payne, The Daily Telegraph

“Heaney has fashioned a masterpiece . . . Its mastery lies [in its] searing speakability.” — William Mullen, The New York Sun