Antigone ([New ed.])

"Antigone" was originally produced in Paris in 1942, when France was an occupied nation and part of Hitler's Europe.

The play depicts an authoritarian regime and the play's central character, the young Antigone, mirrored the predicament of the French people in the grips of tyranny.

Based on Sophocles ancient Greek tragedy of the same title, which was first performed in Athens in the 5th century BC, the theme of "Antigone" was nevertheless topical.

For in Antigone's faithflness to her dead brother and his proper burial and her defiance of the dictator Creon, the French audience saw its own resistance to the German occupation.

The Germans allowed the play to be performed presumably because they found Creon's arguments for dictatorship so convincing.