Antigone (Brecht play)

It was first performed at the Chur Stadttheater in Switzerland in 1948, with Brecht's second wife Helene Weigel, in the lead role.

[citation needed] In 1967 The Living Theatre staged a production in English translated from Brecht's German by Judith Malina, who also directed it and played Antigone.

[4] The play begins with a modern World War II scene in which two sisters discover that their brother, a soldier, has returned from the front.

This first scene is intended to draw the parallel between the death of Polynices, that marks the first and dramatically key event in Sophocles' Antigone, with that of the deserting soldier in World War II.

Creon is played as a Nazi-style dictator, and the cast in most productions wear either modern or World War II German costume to make the parallel more obvious.