Antigone (On Strike)
Park Theatre

THIS modern, imaginative reworking of the Greek tragedy involves a British-born, Isis child bride and her sister’s desperate campaign to stop her being stripped of her citizenship and denied her time in court. The parallels to Shamima Begum’s desperate plight, still detained in a Syrian camp along with 18 other British women, are obvious.

The production centres on the political machinations of the British Conservative government in promoting this policy, while remaining true to the nature of classical Greek theatre by making the audience active participants in the process.

Set within an interactive media studio, we are asked to vote electronically on various questions relating to the issue. Our responses, in between being bombarded with reportage interwoven with political sound bites and the manoeuvrings of an ambitious home secretary, are set against the embattled reflections of the sister at the heart of the campaign.

The impact of presenting the audience with the outcome of their choices for the series of diametrically opposed questions is clear, although less impactful than the moving performance of Hiba Medina as the sister, Antiya, whose emotively publicised hunger strike divides the country. 

Phil Cheadle plays the unsympathetic role of a home secretary who has fully bought into a political reality dominated by the predictions of his Orwellian-type advisers and hooked into social media and propaganda. True to the original story, it is the doomed relationship between Antiya and the home secretary’s socially engaged, troubled son, sensitively played by Ali Hadji-Heshmati, that eventually forces the politician to stop proselytising and show real compassion, if only when events have escalated beyond his control.

Marco Turcich’s marble white set with dais, lectern and throne recall the story’s Greek roots while utilising projections to give it a sterile, modern feel and allow the actors to utilise the traverse stage effectively for the contrasting scenes.

Writer and director Alexander Raptotasios has created a tense and thoughtful production where our political engagement and prejudices are regularly challenged. At times the blitzkrieg of media engagement is intentionally overwhelming and the questions misleadingly simplistic, but in a world where public and private are increasingly melded together through instant, often contrived universal communication, it is an important and telling production. 

Runs until February 22. Box office: 020 7870 6876, parktheatre.co.uk