[In the following excerpt, Marsh analyzes Antigone as both a play of character and a play of ideas.]

Anouilh's second wartime play was not produced until February 1944, in the last six months of the German Occupation, when tempers on both sides were rising and every play was discovered to contain some measure of allusion to the national situation. The Antigone plot of personal loyalties in conflict with the demands of authority was as close as any subject could be to the problem of the moment for so many Frenchmen. Anouilh's play was a centre of dispute: some saw in it a clear demand for revolt against authority, others thought is was a justification of "Vichyism". Whatever the political allusions in the play, in most other countries of the world where the emotions of Occupied France were not in any way involved Anouilh's Antigone has been recognised as a major work. It is, as Gabriel Marcel called it on the occasion of a recent Paris revival, a "witness-play", that sets before the bar of humanity a picture of the whole inevitable degeneration that living in this world must incur.

Anouilh's Antigone cannot accept men as they are, and she is driven to die by her total incapacity to tolerate the demands of life. Like the Antigone of Sophocles, but for different reasons, she could say:

… There is no punishment
Can rob me of my honourable death.

The bones of the story are the same as in Sophocles. Oedipus' two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, have killed each other in battle outside the walls of Thebes. King Creon orders a splendid funeral for Eteocles, who was protecting the city, and Polynices' body to be left for the carrion to pick on the battlefield because an example must be made of him as a traitor. It is proclaimed that anyone who dares to perform the funeral rites over Polynices will be punished with death. Antigone defies this ban and scatters earth over her brother's body. She is caught and taken to Creon, who tries to save her by showing her how stupid and pointless her defiance is. She refuses to accept his arguments and goes willingly to death. Haemon, Creon's son and Antigone's fiancé, curses his father and kills himself in the tomb where Creon has walled up Antigone. On hearing this Eurydice, Creon's wife, cuts her throat in grief and the wretched Creon is left to lament and wait for death alone.

Into his play Anouilh seems to have distilled all his own basic themes—Antigone becomes the symbol of purity of personal conscience, she asks too much of life, she is youthful idealism personified. She will not learn from experience and refuses to give way.

This is the only Anouilh play where the two sides of the conflict of life and death are properly developed into an argument. In the others the scales are so heavily weighted that the issue can never be in doubt. In Antigone Anouilh has so strengthened the opposition in the person of Creon that even Antigone herself begins to waver and we are never sure of ourselves for long.

Anouilh wrote the play to be given in modern dress—the clothes (evening dress for Antigone, Creon, and the Chorus) and the numerous anachronisms (Eteocles is said to have driven a motorcar, the Queen to have "put down her knitting … gone up to her lavender-scented room, with its embroidered doilies and its pictures framed in plush") are clearly intended to bring the play as close as possible to our own time. The anachronisms are not used for cheap comedy, but they do have a startling effect at moments in the play. It is debatable whether any real purpose is served by them, for they are often enough an embarrassing hurdle for the audience to clear. The same aim inspired Macbeth in khaki uniforms and Sam Brownes, but it is now generally admitted that this makes little addition to the force of the story.

The great virtue of this play is in the magnificent central scene, where Creon and Antigone gradually reveal the basic motives of their conduct. The scene is really in two main parts: the first is almost a replica of Sophocles, where Antigone asserts her loyalty to her brother whom she held in affection, and her determination not to deny him the traditional funeral rites, and where Creon declares his authority which he will not allow her to flout; the second part is pure Anouilh, where the Greek values are no longer in dispute and ruler and rebel go deeply into the reasons for accepting or rejecting life on its own terms.

At the opening of this central scene Creon tells Antigone to go to her room and he will hush up her defiance of his edict, but she says: "Why? You know I shall only do it again tonight. …" Then she gives her reasons, the usual ones for traditional burial and her loyalty to her brother. She adds that she knows the consequences and feels sure Creon will put her to death. Creon is taken by surprise at this, but then accuses her of having the same pride as her father Oedipus:

Creon: … Your father was like that. For him as for you human happiness was meaningless; and mere human misery was not enough to satisfy his passion for torment. … You come of people for whom the human vestment is a kind of straitjacket: it cracks at the seams. You spend your lives wriggling to get out of it. Nothing less than a cosy tea-party with death and destiny will quench your thirst.

Antigone still disdains his orders. He shifts his ground and gives his cynical view of the burial ceremony—surely Antigone does not believe in all that sham?

Creon: Tell me, Antigone, do you believe all that flummery about religious burial? Do you really believe that a so-called shade of your brother is condemned to wander for ever homeless if a little earth is not flung on his corpse to the accompaniment of some priestly abracadabra? Have you ever listened to the priests of Thebes when they were mumbling their formula? Have you ever watched those dreary bureaucrats while they were preparing the dead for burial—skipping half the gestures required by the ritual, swallowing half their words, hustling the dead into their graves out of fear that they might be late for lunch?

Antigone: Yes, I've seen all that.

Creon: And did you never say to yourself as you watched them, that if someone you really loved lay under the shuffling, mumbling ministrations of the priests, you would scream aloud and beg the priests to leave the dead in peace?

Antigone: Yes, I've thought all that.

Creon: And you still insist on being put to death—merely because I refuse to let your brother go out with that grotesque passport; because I refuse his body the wretched consolation of that mass-production jibber-jabber, which you would have been the first to be embarrassed by if I had allowed it? The whole thing is absurd!

Antigone: Yes, it's absurd.

Creon: Then why, Antigone, why? For whose sake? For the sake of them that believe in it? To raise them against me?

Antigone: No.

Creon: For whom then if not for them and not for Polynices either?

Antigone: For nobody. For myself.

This is the turning-point in the scene and in the play. Here Anouilh's Antigone gives us her exact position. There is no more pretence about great loyalties or eternal values. From this point on the subject of the play is the temperament of Antigone and the practical expediency of Creon's edict. Creon explains how circumstances forced him to act as he did. He found he had to accept responsibility one day and he would have felt a coward had he refused. The job had to be done, so he said yes. Antigone will not accept his argument and says he should have said no; there is no reason at all for accepting anything you do not want, you can always refuse, she says.

Creon: But God in Heaven! Won't you try to understand me! I'm trying hard enough to understand you! There had to be one man who said yes! Somebody had to agree to captain the ship. She had sprung a hundred leaks; she was loaded to the water-line with crime, ignorance, poverty. The wheel was swinging with the wind. The crew refused to work and were looting the cargo. The officers were building a raft, ready to slip overboard and desert the ship. The mast was splitting, the wind was howling, the sails were beginning to rip. Every man-jack on board was about to drown—and only because the only thing they thought of was their own skins and their cheap little day-to-day traffic. Was that a time, do you think, for playing with words like yes' and no? Was that a time for a man to be weighing the pros and cons, wondering if he wasn't going to pay too dearly later on; if he wasn't going to lose his life, or his family, or his touch with other men? You grab the wheel, you right the ship in the face of a mountain of water. You shout an order and if one man refuses to obey, you shoot straight into the mob. Into the mob, I say! The beast as nameless as the wave that crashes down upon your deck; as nameless as the whipping wind. The thing that drops when you shoot may be someone who poured you a drink the night before; but it has no name. And you, braced at the wheel, you have no name, either. Nothing has a name—except the ship, and the storm. (A pause as he looks at her.) Now do you understand?

Antigone: I am not here to understand. That's all very well for you. I am here to say no to you, and die.

Creon: It is easy to say no.

Antigone: Not always.

Creon: It is easy to say no. To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death. All you have to do is to sit still and wait. Wait to go on living; wait to be killed. That is the coward's part. No is one of your man-made words. Can you imagine a world in which trees say no to the sap? In which beasts say no to hunger or to propagation? Animals are good, simple, tough. They move in droves, nudging one another onwards, all travelling the same road. Some of them keel over, but the rest go on; no matter how many fall by the wayside, there are always those few left which go on bringing their young into the world, travelling the same road with the same obstinate will, unchanged from those who went before.

Antigone: Animals, eh, Creon! What a king you could be if only men were animals!

Creon comes again to the attack, this time the fiercest blow of all—he tells Antigone that Polynices, the brother for whom she is risking death, was a wastrel and a traitor, and that Eteocles was as bad, there was nothing to choose between them. In any case when the battle was over they were both so mutilated that they were unrecognisable; Creon picked one body to bury and left the other to rot—he does not know and does not care which was which.

So Antigone's gesture of loyalty is ridiculous in the extreme—it has no reasonable justification, it is utterly senseless.

This devastates Antigone and she agrees to go to her room. Before this she had vaguely tried to assert an ultimate value—justice: her gesture had not been entirely without point. But Creon now makes the mistake of patronising her and offering advice, giving her his view of social life and the way to achieve happiness. Immediately, instead of admiring his practical approach, Antigone sees the deep reasons for her opposition to Creon—now the feelings that prompted her are clear.

Antigone: I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life—that life must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness—provided a person doesn't ask too much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete, otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die!

What she wanted to do was say no to life and to the people like Creon who were prepared to live it with all its inevitable corruption. She had seized this edict of Creon's as a pretext for a gesture she would have had to make sooner or later. His acceptance of false values is shameful and no one is obliged to accept shame, one can always refuse. That in fact is what she is doing—she is refusing life, for she will not renounce the noble absolutes that are in her aspirations (and in Creon's, as he has admitted by his apologetic explanations) just for this wretched bribe of "happiness". In her view happiness is the price of capitulation.

In the last analysis Creon is the one who is unhappy—he is the one without faith, not Antigone. He feels this, and shows that he is even ashamed of the arguments he is using, though his obstinacy is itself pathetic throughout the disasters that befall him at the end of the play. Many of his lines have a haunting nobility about them, the more poignant in that his kind of temperament is more common among us than is Antigone's.

In spite of their opposition to each other, both she and Creon have given in—Antigone by her refusal to live-and Creon by the manner in which he frames his acceptance. They cancel each other out—each one justifies the other, and each contains a lot of the eternal features of mankind.

One of the most moving parts of the play is in the brilliant Guard scene when Antigone is waiting to be walled into the tomb. Here Anouilh says in a most dramatic manner that the purity of an emotion depends as much on the person who reports it as on the one who feels it. The uncouth Guard's grotesque repetition of Antigone's final message to Haemon is a travesty of the love and purity it expresses; they are unavoidably sullied by his un worthiness. Antigone herself is suddenly overwhelmed by the realisation of her essential loneliness as she looks at the Guard and measures how completely alien he is to her and how far she must be from the mass of humanity. "I don't know any longer why I'm dying," is her pathetic admission, but it is capped by one of Anouilh's peculiarly tragicomic lines from the insensitive Guard: "Nobody ever knows why he's dying."

What is most disturbing is the apparent pointlessness of Antigone's sacrifice. It is referred to again and again, the Chorus at the end even saying: "… if it had not been for Antigone, it's true, they would all have been at peace," Her gesture of defiance is thoroughly gratuitous: she says no to life a priori—she has no need to wait for time to prove her right, she knows it all.

Anouilh wrote in Antigone neither a play of character nor a play of the conflict of ideas, but a mixture of both. He has not got the best out of both in this way, but the blend is now and then arresting. The characters of Antigone and Creon do not in fact permit of a properly developed conflict of ideas, for neither is faced with a substantial opponent; they merely offer each other a flat contradiction. The discussion is limited by Anouilh's characterisation. Antigone's lack of justification (her view of life is based on instinct, not on experience—she does not draw on the past like Thérèse in La Sauvage or Georges in Le Rendez-vous de Senlis) is a dramatic weakness, though it is an obvious development from the characters who rejected life because of their experience of degradation. Creon on the other hand goes further than simple acceptance, for he has resolved his emotional problems by ignoring them altogether.

Yet we all have both Creon and Antigone within us. For the only reply that can shame Creon's excuses is the reply from youth, the one his own youth would have made, a reply whose innocence he has actually experienced and remembers with regret. "Sooner or later there comes a day of sorrow in each man's life when he must cease to be a child and take up the burden of manhood," he says to his son. Conscience is mainly the memory of innocence. We have no conscience when we are innocent; only afterwards do we realise what we have lost and try to a greater or lesser degree to act in faithfulness to it.

The whole play balances on the point of a pin—sometimes the point is so tiny as to vanish altogether, so unreasonable is Antigone's resistance. But if the point of a pin is blunted, you throw the pin away. It is no good giving way and breaking faith with innocence on one matter, merely because it seems too tenuous, and thinking you can still make a brave stand when a bigger issue arises. Once you have given way you are blunted. No wonder the Résistance felt that Antigone was on their side! Death is not always the result of such a stand but it is always the logic of it. Every idealist is a potential martyr. But martyrs are rare and the rest of us are so well acquainted with Creon's arguments that they find echoes in every heart. His is the voice of reason, experience, and a philosophic acceptance of life. It is all so estimable and right—no wonder many people thought that Vichy had found a spokesman!

Whether we sympathise with Antigone or Creon, or both, the play carries us on with the same dramatic force. Though we probably feel more pity for Creon (and with him all mankind) than for Antigone. We feel for her because she is a helpless, lonely child, but her purity and pride are sufficient to themselves. Anouilh's brilliance is in making us see the problem in these terms: the pride and purity of the death-wishers, the pitiful condition of those who seem to grow up, and accept.

The appeal of the play is to be found in the sense of solitude in all men that Anouilh has so poignantly conveyed. No defiant little youngster in any nursery, or later faced with the world of men, ever felt more lonely than Antigone as her Guard walks her away to death; and no aged statesman ever looked more futile than the broken Creon as he leans on his page at the end of the play and gives his final view with a bitter smile:

Creon: … In a hurry to grow up, aren't you?

Page: Oh yes, sir.

Creon: I shouldn't be if I were you. Never grow up if you can help it.