6th Jan

When approaching the role of Antigone, i thought that it would be an emotionally draining one; and indeed it was. However im not sure if i approached it the right way. I wanted the audience to feel the pain and injustice that had been caused to asntigone and so i portrayed her as a sad, angered victim; complete with the tears, emotional voice and actions that portrayed a distressed character. However i was reading a bit from Stan's book Building a character when something struck me. He said that it was an actors job to pour out all the emotions at home and then on stage use that energy to portray and convey those emotions to the audience so that they instead of him will feel those deep emotions. How in the world does one do that? Aren't we suppose to feel the character first and seeing what the character is feeling the audience being human wil respond. I do understand that he wants us to do this so that we dont choke during the [erformance; but how do we know how much to show, and how do we make the audience feel what we felt?

With ref to my monologue and Sophocles, he took the psychological approach, wanting to display characters in distress experienceing such overpowering emotion, his aim must have been for the audience to feel it. In some ways it is like Brecht's Epic theatre. He draws the audience to sympathize with his protagonists and then asks them to step back using the Chorus and analyze the scene from a 3rd person perspective so as to balance tyhe play out.

Sophocles aim was never to give the answer of right and wrong, in fact there seldom is any because there is nothing more to it than fate. What one God considers right may be wrong to another God since there are so many contradictory God's. What he does is to present the two sides and sort of ask the people to choose, although at times he leans towards one side more than the other. What Antigone did was wrong in the eyes of men's law and what Creon did was wrong to the God's. So both are kind of wrong in a way, so there is a sort of balance between the two.