ABSTRACT
In 1984 Irish poet and playwright Aidan Carl Mathews collaborated with director Michael Scott to write and stage an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. The driving force for his work, he writes, was a conviction that “Antigone, like all the major tragedies of the Greek canon, exists in cowed form. This chapter shows that radical hypertheatrical interaction not just with Antigone, Medea or The Trojan Women but with all canonical theatre, achieves just that aim that Mathews set out to accomplish in his own remaking. When the myth, the narrative, the “what happens next” part of the theatrical event is known, then it is easier for the form to become new and surprising, difficult and challenging, experimental and deconstructive. When audiences attend an adaptation of a well known fixed narrative, they usually bring with them certain expectations which have been shaped and conditioned by the very nature of the narrative.
