12 Oct 07

On 10 October Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney visited Oxford to speak about the inspiration for his work and to see a new production of his play Burial at Thebes, a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, produced by the Onassis Programme for the Performance of Greek Drama at Oxford University.

Seamus Heaney gave a special post-show talk at the Oxford Playhouse on 10 October, outlining how his travels in Greece have inspired his work. He spoke of how he had been inspired by the culture and the landscape and the similarities he found in the cultural and literary history of Greece and Ireland. He explained his artistic choices of language and metre both in his Burial at Thebes and The Cure at Troy, and the wider political role of poetry and the arts.

Burial at Thebes is showing at the Oxford Playhouse until 13 October, it is a ‘speakable’ translation of Antigone and explores the conflict between personal loyalty and public responsibility. Antigone’s brother’s body has been left where it fell during a rebellion and her uncle, Kong Creon, has outlawed its burial. Antigone has to choose whether to obey Creon or follow her heart and risk renewed violence.

Commenting on theatre, the arts and politics Seamus Heaney said: ‘Theatre in society, in the body politic, is rather like the immunity system in the actual body. It is an immunity system, which can, I suppose, break down, but it can work also.

‘I called the play Burial because the word recalls to us our destiny as members of a mortal species and reminds us, however subliminally, of the need to acknowledge and allow the essential dignity of every human creature.

‘Talking about Antigone and The cure at Troy, I think what they can give you is recognition, and I think recognition is a form of movement, it’s a form of change. Poetry makes nothing happen actually, but if recognition happens, if there is a ‘yes!’ something has happened and things have moved one changed a bit. The plane of regard has shifted, it makes a difference.’