Antigone in the Amazon

One of Europe’s most boldly imaginative, avant-garde political theatre-makers Milo Rau makes his thunderous, earth-shaking debut at Sydney Festival with Antigone in the Amazon. An NTGent collaboration with the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, the play reincarnates the timeless figure of Antigone – Sophocles’ archetypal 5th-century BC activist – as the sister of Oziel, a real-life Indigenous man who was one of 21 people massacred by state police during a 1996 peaceful protest on the Amazonian highway of ‘blood and resistance’. 

Rehearsed on occupied land in Pará, this radically told, profoundly moving and visually arresting production features four brilliant actors on stage – Frederico Araujo (Polynices), Sara De Bosschere (Creon), Arne De Tremerie (Haemon), and Pablo Casella, the ‘Greek chorus’ and talented multi-instrumentalist. Behind them on a three-panel screen appear dozens more, many of whom are non-professionals cast from the local community, and live in the waking shadow of violence and dispossession. Action on stage and on screen overlap, interact, and ripple; as do profound ideas of truth and myth, representation and reality, activism and guilt, past and present. Notably, the actor who plays Antigone herself, Kay Sara, appears only on video. She is done uprooting herself for western audiences to try and convince them her story is equal to the Greek cannon, and chooses now to only perform for her community. Her stage lines are spoken by Araujo.

We learn of Sara’s choice through the four live actors, who give a running, contextualising meta-commentary of the show as it was being made, and as it is being performed. This disruptive narration enriches in ways big and small. We hear of how villagers told Araujo he looked just like Oziel; we learn that the police almost prevented the filming of massacre’s enactment; we see ‘behind-the-scenes’ footage of a woman leaning through the front window of a police car to convince them the blockade is for “all of us”; and we are told her name. 

Boundary-pushing theatre of blazing urgency, this deconstructed allegory for our apocalyptic times is superlative programming for the 2025 festival, and an absolute must-see.