It is the winter of 1944, in Paris, and the Nazis are in town. They’ve been here for four years now, occupying the city—which is to say, taking up space in it, living cheek by jowl with the objects of their oppression. They eat in the same restaurants. They drink in the same clubs. For the German occupiers, Paris is a playground; for the Parisian citizenry, it’s a place increasingly difficult to recognize as home. Some have learned to collaborate. Others risk their lives, in secret, to resist. But in February, the long, uneasy dance between compliance and defiance is interrupted by the debut of a different kind of performance, the hottest ticket in town: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone.
It took a great deal of nerve to stage this play, a reimagining of the 2,000-year-old tragedy of the same name by the Greek playwright Sophocles. Antigone tells the tale of a country torn by civil war and a doomed woman fighting its new, tyrannical leadership for the right to bury her brother. It’s a story of honor and duty, of resistance and rebellion—and, if the Nazis had been offended, a story that might well have caused the theater to be raided, the actors and playwright kidnapped, imprisoned, or even killed.
Of course, if the play had been pure pro-Hitler propaganda, its creators would have been deemed collaborators and suffered the consequences accordingly. Which is to say, a lot could have gone very badly! But nothing did: In the end, this morally complex and anti-authoritarian show went on under the watchful gaze of Hitler’s minions, who sat in the audience and clapped.
