Risignificare Antigone The Island di Athol Fugard

Abstract

This study aims to investigate The Island (1973), a South African rewriting of the Sophocles’s Antigone. The drama was conceived by Athol Fugard, the most acclaimed contemporary South African playwright, assisted by John Kani and Winston Ntshona, two actors-activists, as well as the unique interpreters of the pièce. In Fugard’s play, the existential path of the young Theban heroine intersects itself with the circumstances of a story that really happened in full apartheid interregnum: the impromptu staging of Antigone by prisoners of Robben Island (including Nelson Mandela), the penitentiary island off Cape Town. The theatre became not only an instrument of escape but above all of resistance, better still of survival.