This "translation" of the Antigone is, I think, about Antigone and translation and that's the big picture I took away--the preface "Dear Antigone" andThis "translation" of the Antigone is, I think, about Antigone and translation and that's the big picture I took away--the preface "Dear Antigone" and the actions of the chorus make me think that in particular. There's a lot of time spent reducing the text down to very small materials that encapsulate what those lines did, without doing anything that could possibly be actually representing the words of the original text themselves. The regular references to Hegel and to productions and and performances of Antigone reflect that.
Eurydike's speech was interesting, picturing her suicide verbally without ever actually showing us any more than we would otherwise see in a "usual" production of the play. I think that was probably the most effective change for me--although I wonder if increased knowledge of translation theory might make this more understandable for me. I had trouble remembering "Nick"'s presence (my sister thinks he might signify time--from some clues in Eurydike's speech).
The formatting was clearly intentional, but I wasn't really sure what to do with it, although I do wonder if it is in some way reflective of a close line-correspondence between this text and the original play, or at least a desire to give it by covering material seemingly according to line rather than according to story. Broadly speaking, I am not really sure how I felt about this, but I think it has the potential to be very interesting....more
These six plays make a wonderful intro to Lillian Hellman and American theater in the 1930s through the early 1950s. I'll talk about each one separateThese six plays make a wonderful intro to Lillian Hellman and American theater in the 1930s through the early 1950s. I'll talk about each one separately, although they all share well-drawn characters and elegant dramatic structure.
The Children's Hour: This or The Little Foxes was my favorite. This one is about the power of an angry child over the adults around her as well as about homophobia in 1934 when it (and what it is afraid of) was almost impossible to name. The use of the passage of time was perfect, as was the slow development of Mary, Karen, and Martha over the play. I thought that Hellman really isolated the terrible power of righteousness (as opposed to rightness): "It had to be done." She also uses the malicious charge to show the power of doubt and uncertainty to change things that we would like to believe are unchangeable. The play uses its shape to fill in enormous amounts of plot that happen off-stage and I love it, because it makes those scenes all the more effective for being invisible. (view spoiler)[We can only imagine the depth of Mary's cruelty, since we only see a taste. We don't watch doom fall, instead we discover it from tone and feeling long before the events of the failed libel suit are actually recounted. (hide spoiler)]
Days to Come is a labor tragedy, pure and simple. Right down to the elements of hamartia and peripeteia. When the boss brings in strikebreakers he learns about his own folly and looses his wealth as well as the love of his workers. Greed and a sort of vicious understanding are rampant and I love the moment of knowledge that appears in in classic Greek tragic form: (view spoiler)["I'm over here thinking how I don't like being a murderer. You are fortunate. You don't seem to mind so much." (hide spoiler)] It is, like all tragedy, not without sympathy for the one who makes the mistake, but also does not shrink from a certainty that this was the wrong way to handle things--even if there may have been no right one. (The interactions between the strikebreaker and the labor organizer also underscore this).
The Little Foxes: Tricky and unkind, the Hubbards scheme around one another. Each of them is, perhaps, a little fox, but the toll it takes on their humanity is great. I loved the way Hellman takes advantage of her setting here--it is set earlier than any play in the collection except Another Part of the Forest which tells the story of this same family twenty years prior to this one. By placing it in the South, in a world still dealing with the costs of Reconstruction, one that is still trying to look genteel while sweeping its hideous history under the rug, Hellman draws attention to deep-rooted awfulness. The characters's falseness highlights the falseness of the myth of politeness and aristocracy (or near-aristocracy) that their wealth projects, and thus reflects of the possibilities of such falseness for all such presentations. Once again, she makes expert use of scenes off-stage and in the gap between acts to allow this drama to play out entirely in a single living room, tightening the story down to its most necessary parts and making this a story with great import by adamantly refusing to give it epic, universal scope.
Watch on the Rhine is a play about politics, fascism, desperation, complicity and the lack thereof, and fear. It speaks quickly to its time. First performed in April 1941 and set in spring 1940, I have to ask if the play did not encourage public sentiment towards joining the war and the necessity of fighting fascism. But at the same time, it understands complicity even as it condemns it. (view spoiler)[Kurt is made to be clearly in the right for killing Teck, but we are made to know and feel exactly why Teck did it, made to ask whether we would be able to be Kurt or if would would have to be Teck, even hating fascism. (hide spoiler)]
Another Part of the Forest goes back further in time to continue the story of the Hubbards. How did they become the people they became, why have they devoted themselves to their unhappiness, what is their motivation? It answers these questions and also portrays a compelling picture of avarice and selfishness and manipulation between the various characters. It was my least favorite of the six plays, but it still managed to create characters effectively, filling in their psyches in ways that The Little Foxes did not.
is a sweet and sadly funny story about loneliness. It's just beautiful and while not as harrowing as The Children's Hour or The Little Foxes, it reaches depths of feeling that are only obtainable with a tale that is so very personal and close. Every character is human and the play charts their whole lives in little bursts over the course of a single week. Another story told mostly in hints and unseen happenings, what we do see is just enough for us to fill in the remainder of the story on our own. Everyone is trying to find their way and just barely failing at it--facades crumble like abandoned buildings as the play goes on and the week wears on everyone in it. Particularly poignant for me was Fredrick and Sophie's desperate attempts to put together a life without any hope of loving each other--she because she needs something other than what her aunt wants for her and he because (I think) he's probably trying to obscure homosexual inclinations so that he can maintain his respectability and his ties to his mother and grandmother. This was not the only story that played out through the play, however, and all of them trace loss and lack with ease and brilliance....more
Wow. While The Pillowman doesn't compete with Arcadia for "favorite play" or with The Dining Room and Love Letters for "second favorite play", it is aWow. While The Pillowman doesn't compete with Arcadia for "favorite play" or with The Dining Room and Love Letters for "second favorite play", it is a strong contender for "best emotionally draining play". The Pillowman is relentless; its hope has been stained blood red and pus yellow, shot through with sickly lightning, and its despair is the exact color of snowblindness and starless December midnights in the Arctic circle. This play is exhausting and beautiful; painful and elegant. Do I want to see a production? Absolutely. Will I need a nice long hug and Winnie-The-Pooh or a similar lighthearted and innocent tale afterwards? Also absolutely. The Pillowman is a smart and slick play about stories, and about suffering, and about regret. The protagonist, Katurian Katurian, is a writer of clever, effective, and twisted short stories, most of which narrate the brutal maiming or death of children. Katurian is so preoccupied with the death and abuse of children, as we find out in Act One Scene Two, because (view spoiler)[his parents tortured his older brother Michal, who Katurian had never met, in earshot of Katurian, from the time Katurian was seven to the time Katurian was 14 (when Katurian killed his parents) as part of a grand artistic experiment to create the twisted short-story writer he became (hide spoiler)]. The play opens in a police interrogation room, where Katurian is being asked to confess to the murder of three missing children; two of whom were murdered in manners that mirrored his stories. Katurian insists he did not murder the children (view spoiler)[he didn't; his brother, emotionally and developmentally damaged from his years of torture did in an effort to see how far-fetched Katurian's stories really were (hide spoiler)] but he is not believed (view spoiler)[until the very end of the play, when the third child is found, having been cast by Michal in the only one of Katurian's stories that doesn't involve violence to children--even though Michal told his brother that she had been murdered according to the most gruesome story Katurian had ever written (hide spoiler)]. Each act moves between the day of the investigation and impending execution and a dream-like performance/telling of at least one of Katurian's stories, although the stories are also sometimes told within the context of the "real world" of the play. Everyone in the play has suffered. Everyone is allowed their humanity and their violence, without the play seeming to condone it. Ariel is right when he says that being an abused child does not justify abusing children, but he misses the evil hidden in his excessive force against the accused. Katurian saved his brother (view spoiler)[but then murders Michal by smothering to spare him execution. Tupolski has lost and regrets what he has lost, and executes Katurian in spite of his knowledge of how wrong the whole scenario is. Everyone in the play has a story. One they star in, one they tell themselves, one they cling to. That, at its core, is the one hope of the play. Inside this almost-world of anger and pain is a firm belief that stories matter--that they can effect people; that they are worth saving. At the end of the play, Katurian, dead, stands up and tells one final story and he says "for reasons only known to himself, the bulldog of a policeman chose not to put the stories in the burning trash, but placed them carefully with Katurian's case file, which he then sealed away to remain unopened for fifty-odd years. A fact which would have ruined the writer's fashionably downbeat ending, but was somehow . . . somehow . . . more in keeping with the spirit of the thing." And this final act of story-telling is incredibly powerful, a loud and somehow hopeful assertion of the importance of storytelling. The stories themselves also fit drive home the love of the story, fairy-tale-like they wait in the middle of the play for the characters to need them. (cw(view spoiler)[I personally found the story "The Pillowman", told by Katurian to Michal in act two to be the most disturbing. It places a sort of veneer of mercy and hopelessness on the horrifying events that occur The Pillowman convinces people who are about to kill themselves to kill themselves in seemingly accidental deaths as children, because he is sparing them the pain of their doomed, miserable lives, by having them kill themselves earlier. Even though the Pillowman hates his job, this was, to me, more distressing than any of the stories of incredible violence that peppered the rest of the play (hide spoiler)]) The Pillowman was powerful and fascinating; an aggressive and draining, but overall worthwhile read. (hide spoiler)]...more
**spoiler alert** actual rating 3.5 This was quite the play. Mac produces a tumbling, near-absurd environment for his play to fill in hir. In his note **spoiler alert** actual rating 3.5 This was quite the play. Mac produces a tumbling, near-absurd environment for his play to fill in hir. In his note at the beginning of the script, Mac says thatthis should be "absurd realism"--a realistic scenario taken all the way to the absurd outcome; plausibility and absurdity at one and the same time. The family and house feel the same, ramshackle, desperate, falling apart. Isaac and Paige face off throughout hir in desperation; each of them trying to heal their damaged souls with anger. They are diametrically opposed throughout the play: Isaac frantically trying to restore "order"--a clean house, his abusive father back "in charge", Max the sister he thought he had instead of the genderqueer sibling he has--and Paige reveling in disorder and manufactured freedom--forbidding Isaac to clean, dressing her once-abusive husband in nightgowns and makeup and dosing him with estrogen that wasn't prescribed while she imposes her way with slaps and squirt bottle, exulting in Max's transness and semi-fluidity in a way that give hir little to no agency over hir own identity (so much so that Isaac thinks Paige put Max up to this). Max and Arnold are caught in the middle of this. Arnold is imbecilic after his stroke and Max spends the entire play being ordered about by hir brother and mother, sometimes going along, sometimes rebelling, sometimes cheerful, sometimes angry. The house is cluttered and messy and loud, but also strangely empty, as devoid of . . . something as it is implied to have been when Isaac went away. Everything is slowly coming apart at the seams. Paige is just waiting for the end of order so she can have her rigidly enforced squalor, depending on Max for the future when all Max wants is to convince everyone that hir gender is not, in fact, new, but rather very very old. Isaac tries to hold the present in the past, as violently, problematically, hopeful and as dangerously disillusioned as his mother. The arguments over homeschooling capture this--Paige insisting that she can homeschool because creationists are allowed to; Max declaring that ze is really teaching Paige even though Paige's insistence on appropriating all of Max's experiences makes her think she is teaching hir and all Isaac can do is insist that education must be completed within the educational system and that this whole arrangement is doomed. Everything is balanced on the edge and in the end, neither Paige nor Isaac emerges successful, Max is pained but holding on, and Arnold has slipped by the wayside. An extremely intense play, but a good one, with effective and quick dialogue that underscores the turmoil that these characters are attempting to simultaneously vocalize and suppress. ...more
I will preface this review by saying that I have never seen The Simpsons, not even one episode, not even once. This is important, since an extremely lI will preface this review by saying that I have never seen The Simpsons, not even one episode, not even once. This is important, since an extremely large portion of the play is composed entirely of references. The play takes place in a world where the electric grid has been decimated and everyone is afraid, and the characters are trying to create some semblance of normalcy by doing their very best to recreate an episode of The Simpsons from memory. The first act is immediately after the disaster; they are not established in their new world; they are desperately searching for word of the people they used to know, with little notebooks of names to ask for every time they meet someone new. In the second act, the recreation of television has become an industry and a way of life; they are a theater, complete with effects and staged commercials in the middle of their show. Act three, taking place 75 years after act one, is a fantasia--a full-scale near-ritualistic musical performance of the same episode of the show, melded with The Mikado and strange echoes of the events of the first two acts. The play was slightly surreal and decidedly disconcerting, but a powerful examination of the need to construct worlds, the way we desperately try to generate meaning and meaninglessness, order and motion out of disorder and stillness. When in act two, they are discussing a commercial they are performing and Gibson declares "In baby steps. I think they are ready for Status," we are shoved into a world that is trying so hard to remember what it used to be, to recreate an order and a regularity that it could have had once. The same effect is had by the enormous conversation about Diet Coke, and, when you get down to it, the simple fact that they are working so hard to recreate television in a world where television is impossible. The abrupt moments of loss, of violence, of surreal action serve to drive home the desperation in the search for regularity and they move the play along through its dark matter-of-fact directness. I suspect the play is better if you are able to understand the constant allusions to The Simpsons, but I count it as a triumph of the work that I was able to follow it and remain engaged and that I would be glad to see a production without any knowledge of the television material that forms so much of the script....more
I greatly enjoyed Othello. I was particularly impressed by how this play manages to construct itself around a villain-protagonist. Iago is a slick andI greatly enjoyed Othello. I was particularly impressed by how this play manages to construct itself around a villain-protagonist. Iago is a slick and smooth manipulator and deceiver, and the play is his story; the story of his resentment for Othello. The title character is little more than an unwitting pawn in Iago's game, a game written for the express purpose of ruining Othello's life in recompense for his decision to pass over Iago for the office of his lieutenant. Iago employs brilliantly circular speeches to trick Othello and Roderigo into doubt and violence, anger at all the wrong people, jealousy, paranoia, and treachery. When Othello starts mirroring Iago's obliqueness with his confusion, he has already been bewildered and beguiled into doom:
By the world I think my wife be honest, and think she is not; I think that thou art just, and think thou art not. I'll have some proof.
The mask of evasion and shifted responsibility is powerful and elegant and places at the center of the play a perfectly despicable character to watch while everyone around him falls. Also of particular interest in this play is Desdemona and her inconsistent subjectivity. She behaves erratically, deceiving her father and full of agency in her love for Othello at the beginning of the play, certain and solicitous on behalf of Cassio in the middle, barely able to speak to defend herself at the end of the play--but never contradicts herself within a single appearance on the stage. Desdemona becomes a screen for the play to project onto: in need of a mover to save Othello at the beginning she is one, when she must love Cassio well enough to take his suit to her husband she does, when a dutiful and chaste wife in necessary to make her death all the more tragic, that becomes her sole characteristic for the duration of the scene. This allows Desdemona to be read for the projections--"what does the play need her to be in this moment?" we can ask and once we answer we can perhaps more easily discern one thing the play needs itself to be in the same time....more
Well, that's not quite right. I did give The Glass Menagerie four stars after all, and if it hadn't been . . .something, I woThis was . . . something.
Well, that's not quite right. I did give The Glass Menagerie four stars after all, and if it hadn't been . . .something, I would have given it five. It really was beautiful. Williams' language is careful and fluid and effective while still sounding close enough to real that I could hear it on the stage:
Tom: Adventure and change were imminent in this year. They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the folds of Chamberlain's umbrella-- In Spain there was Guernica! But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows. . . . All the world was waiting for bombardments!
And that was narration, but the dialogue is just as efficient and smooth throughout the entire play. The stage directions are clear and interesting and some effects named I can envision with great clarity and power--like a pool of light on Laura, in contrast to her dimly lit mother and brother, while she herself is silent and off to the side of the scene, the focus, although not the primary participant of what is going on. In terms of thematic concerns, The Glass Menagerie is an interesting meditation on restlessness, loneliness, ambition (and the lack thereof), and family dynamics. Tom's restless energy and his constant movie-going--which his mother refuses to believe is his real behavior--brings to mind Williams's own position as a gay man, but that particular resonance could just be me reading into the play unnecessarily. The other motions--the hopelessness of uneven ambition, the loneliness and isolation of Amanda and Laura, the way their fears and hopes interact, coming even sometimes to the same thing, Tom's restless ambition and the struggle the draw of the outside and the claims of family--are clear and ringing through the play, which is wracked by pain and frustration really from beginning to end--a function of the memory play conceit, whereby all of this is long over and the small tragedy that closes it has already occurred. The reason it was . . . something and not just a beautiful play lies in some "objectionable" sections. Not so much the racial slurs, which, while cruel, are a product of their time and could be removed (or not--although I suspect I would remove them) in production without harming the play or its decidedly Southern tones. What I noticed was a never spoken sense of misogyny, stronger than the explicit racism in the text, which is pronounced casually and without vehemence. Tom's fight with his mother, in particular, reeks not just of an argument between them, but of an articulated disgust towards women, even though the closest it came to direct speech is Tom's calling his mother a "witch". This made the whole thing inspire even more ambivalence than its quietly tragic plot would create anyway, which made for a very odd reading experience....more
Reading Arcadia was like sinking into the earth and feeling plants push up through my skin. I was awed; I was hopeful; I was knocked down and let restReading Arcadia was like sinking into the earth and feeling plants push up through my skin. I was awed; I was hopeful; I was knocked down and let rest and allowed expanding from the very center of everything all at once. This was one of the best plays I have ever read, tender, intelligent, and simply gorgeous. Stoppard's dialogue is witty and wise and the stage directions hint at a staging that allows for the best exploration of time I have considered in a stage play. (I want to see a production so badly now, but don't know anywhere that is putting it on) The play takes place across the early nineteenth century and the present day, moving back and forth through a room in a well-appointed English country house where in 1809, Thomasina Coverly is being taught by her tutor Septimus Hodge, and the bustle of the house goes on around her and her attempts to understand both people and mathematics, and in the present, the descendants of the Coverly family live and work and two visiting researchers are exploring the history of the house in the early nineteenth century--the mysterious hermit who lived on the grounds for a number of years in the 1810s and 20s, the possible presence of Lord Byron at the home (confirmed by the events in Thomasina's time). It asks questions about what it means to know, and about whether or not the goal is in the knowing or the finding out, proposing in Act Two both of the following exchanges:
Hannah: Oh, that. It's all trivial--your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron. Comparing what we are looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing failure is final.
and
Septimus: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore. Thomasina: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?
Each of these proposes a grand hope in the fact that we will never be able to learn everything we set out to learn, that we must fail and we must succeed and that we may not know which it is until it is far too late for it to matter. There is a vast hope in finding meaning in people--something brought to mind in Septimus's name, uncommon enough, and famously used in Mrs. Dalloway a book (and a character within it) that performs an astonishing merger of optimism and despair among the many other axes on which he and it operate. Similarly, the meditations on chaos, on entropy, on dissolution are both serious and undespairing:
Thomasina: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd? Septimus: No. Thomasina: Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart. Septimus: No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangable, and we are done with it forever. This is known as free will or self-determination. (He picks up the tortoise and moves it a few inches as though it had strayed, on top of some loose papers) Sit!
The play is honest and sharp and soft. Theatrically, it has a number of fascinating techniques at work, principally among them the two times which share a space and do, at the end of the play, interact without ever acknowledging that they are both happening. This is first set up in the explicit instruction to never remove an item from the table that forms a good portion of the set unless a character is actually taking the item. Papers, mugs, books, pens, etc, all stay on the table, simply invisible if they could not reasonably be in the location of the time of the current scene. This is especially important at the end when characters from different times begin to use the same prop as one another during a single scene. A play of marked power and beauty, Arcadia has taken a spot among the very best theater I have read, the best works I have read, and my favorite reads for the year to date....more
I read this for English class(don't know the translator)and found it fascinating. I love the way the seagull works as a metaphor for Nina and for KonsI read this for English class(don't know the translator)and found it fascinating. I love the way the seagull works as a metaphor for Nina and for Konstantine and the way their parallel "ruinings" work out. Nina is slightly mad, but it is Konstantine who ends up the worse off (view spoiler)[committing suicide (hide spoiler)]. Irina is a fascinating character, a brilliant exploration in selfishness and vanity and the insecurities that lie beneath them. Chekhov refers to it as a "comedy" but it is only "comic" in its elements of satirizing people for attaching importance to things senselessly, or in the sense that all life is comic, a wild experience that is so happy you cry and so sad you laugh, often at the same time. A wonderful piece of drama....more
This play was brilliant. Blanche's tragedy was powerful, as she fell from all that she could be (but wasn't really) into darkness, due to the long agoThis play was brilliant. Blanche's tragedy was powerful, as she fell from all that she could be (but wasn't really) into darkness, due to the long ago suicide of her husband, and the atrocity committed by her brother-in-law, Stanley. Stanley and Stella's relationship was beautifully portrayed, heartbreaking as she permits his abuse, but understandable. We know, we sympathize with why Stella stays, what about him attracts her, even as we, like Blanche, are afraid of him from the moment he first walks on stage. Every line of this play is powerful and singing and feels honest and true, as if the play were merely a recording of a real woman living, with an un-self-conscious knowledge of the beauty of words and how to express herself with them. The play is rife with symbolism, at once surprising and surprisingly obvious, and foreshadowing of the tragedy to come. Blanche's desperation is clear: "I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes magic. ... I don't tell truth I tell what ought to be truth." and her story pulls us in with its deep pain and endless, yet futile hope. This is among the best plays I have ever read.
One analytical note to think about, which I discussed with my Literature class. Flowers are discussed incredibly frequently, almost always in conjuction with suffering/death and equally frequently false. The imaginary roses, the tin flowers, the artificial violets. As one example of the symbolism mentioned in the previous paragraph, flowers make for a wonderful opening into a discussion of innocence and illusion. They are most definitely my favorite of all the symbols mentioned in the play. The best quote: About the soldiers Blanche slept with: "Later, the paddy-wagon would gather them up like daisies." Both Blanche and the soldiers are trying to fill their emotional voids,but it doesn't work. They are nothing but dead flowers, futile attempts at creating life....more
I just read this book for English class and it was very good. The poetry was powerful and elegant, just what a translation of Sophocles should be. My I just read this book for English class and it was very good. The poetry was powerful and elegant, just what a translation of Sophocles should be. My favorite of the three plays is Antigone, followed by Oedipus at Colonus. I've read Antigone twice, once the Robert Fagles translation, twice in this one, and Oedipus Rex twice, this and the J.E. Thomas translation. I have to say, this was a better Oedipus Rex (still feels like the weakest of the plays, but I think I know why I feel like that), but this Antigone is not quite as beautiful as the Robert Fagles translation, although still quite good. I think I dislike Oedipus Rex so much because I have read some other Greek tragedy and have found I like Aeschylus better than Sophocles and Euripides. Antigone, being the earliest of the three plays, still contains shades of Aeschylus, and Oedipus at Colonus, being the latest, came when Sophocles had had his whole life to perfect his style and pull everything good about his other works into this one. This would be a five star book but for my personal preferences for Aeschylus and dislike of Oedipus Rex, so I would recommend it for anyone who wants to read Sophocles.
So this is super infuriating. I wanted to read all three plays in the Fagles translation, so that I could compare them, but Goodreads won't let me review these different translations seperately. Anyway, I just read The Three Theban Plays translated by Robert Fagles with introduction and notes by Bernard Knox. This is the Penguin Classics Edition; not the edition titled The Oedipus Cycle, translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald which I reviewed above. The Fagles edition was vastly better than the Fitts and Fitzgerald. A definite five star book. The poetry was better, absolutely gorgeous all the time, and certain thematic elements were much stronger in the Fagles translation. I still like Antigone best, but all three were five star plays in this translation; this is easily the most I enjoyed Oedipus the King of any of the three readings of the play. Sorry for the mash-up comparison-review; I tried to write a separate review for each publication of the plays because of the different translators, but Goodreads won't let me because the actual works contained are the same. If you can get it, read The Three Theban Plays (Penguin Classics) instead of The Oedipus Cycle, but the second is decent if it's what you've got on hand....more
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