The Burial at Thebes

The Burial at Thebes is Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone.
The Burial at Thebes, first commissioned by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre as part of its centenary celebrations in 2004, brings a powerful new imagining of Sophocles’ 5th Century BCE masterpiece that “takes Sophocles’ dense, concentrated poetry and decants it into a beautifully transparent contemporary idiom” (The Irish Times). The story examines the clash of family duty vs. civic duty, natural laws vs. manmade rules, and a woman’s personal morality at odds with a tyrannical ruler who stubbornly sees his own decrees as dominant to the law of the land.