ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON / SYDNEY FESTIVAL

By Diana Simmonds

January 5 2025

ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON, NTGent and Sydney Festival at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, 4–8 January 2025. Photography by Kurt Van der Elst

In April 2023, Swiss theatre-maker Milo Rau made headlines across Brazil. He and colleagues in NTGent took part with activists of the Landless Workers Movement in re-enacting an infamous 1996 massacre of 19 farm workers, shot by police as they ceremonially blockaded the Trans-Amazonian Highway. It was the culmination of three Covid-interrupted years work to bring Antigone in the Amazon to the stage.

It was also the third in a trilogy of works in which Rau interwove ancient texts with present-day Third World events to light fires under the comfortable bottoms of his First World theatre-goers. (The other two were Aeschylus’s The Oresteia in Iraq (Orestes in Mosul) in 2019, and The Revolt of Dignity & The New Gospel, made in Matera in southern Italy in 2018.)

The result – in Antigone in the Amazon at least, for that’s the one we have in Sydney – is a curiously kaleidoscopic yet affecting melange. On stage are four actors who address the audience as themselves as well as acting roles from Antigone, and as themselves in enacting events from their time in Pará county, southern Brazil. This, simultaneously with documentary footage on screens behind them, in which they not only feature but also interact with locals – the choir/chorus – who also act roles as themselves and others from earlier times.

If it sounds confusing, it isn’t, because the storytelling is crystal clear whether utilising Aeschylus to compare and contrast, or the massacre survivors and other working poor of that corner of Brazil. And if it feels comfortably exotic and historically removed from Sydney’s summer Festival, a report from Amnesty International states, “Since 19 landless farm workers were killed in the south-east of Pará state on 17 April 1996 – an incident which became known as the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre – more than 271 rural workers and leaders have been killed in Pará alone.”

The performance opens on a low-lit stage, its floor ankle-deep in red-dark soil. On one side sits Pablo Casella, assorted drums and other instruments beside him as he gently riffs on an amplified acoustic guitar. Nearby is Frederico Araujo a Brazilian actor whose performance(s) are mesmerising throughout. Across the other side is a rack of clothes, a couple of chairs and a table, and accomplished Belgian actors, Sara De Bosschere and Arne De Tremerie. When video footage comes into play it’s projected from the back of the stage onto three long banner-like screens that scroll down from on high. Above all and centred is a surtitle screen – the dialogue is in Brazilian-Portuguese and Flemish. That’s it.

Such simplicity and such complexity. Across the entrance to the Ros Packer hang scarlet banners like those seen in the Eldorado dos Carajás footage. But they’re so high most patrons will miss them as they hurry in, intent on reaching the bar or the dunny. And that’s the thing about political theatre in a Festival context: who cares for what is being unleashed on the stage? After three enthusiastic curtain calls, many in the opening night audience were rushing off to the after-party across the street, or were turning left for the pleasures of the “Thirsty Mile” (itself a typical Sydney whitewashing of the historic, tragic Hungry Mile).

The irony is that this production is a pushback against the greenwashing by Western governments of the relentless destruction taking place across Amazonia, and the resulting catastrophe of climate change. Never mind the relentless persecution by successive Brazilian governments of the region’s land-deprived first peoples. Towards the end, the observation is made that in what we have witnessed, the killers and the killed are the same family, and civil war is the worst.

For someone whose shameful knowledge of Brazil is Carnival, piranhas, and nuts, Antigone in the Amazon is an eye-opener, a heart-wrencher, and a history and political lesson in an extraordinarily entertaining and absorbing hour and 50 minutes.