(The guard leaves at a run. Creon stands for a moment without speaking. Suddenly, he murmurs.) ✎
CREON ✎ —A child... 🔊✎ (He takes the little page by the shoulder.) ✎ Come on, kid. Now we'll have to tell everyone... 🔊✎ And then, we'll have to clean up the mess. Would you die for me? Do you think you'd go out with your little spade? 🔊✎ (The page looks at him. Creon leaves with him, patting his head.) ✎ Yes, of course you would. You'd go out at once, you too... 🔊✎ (We hear him sigh again as they leave.) ✎ A child... 🔊✎
They have left. ✎ The chorus enters. ✎
THE CHORUS ✎ —So here we are. Now the spring is wound tight. It just has to unwind all by itself. That's what's so easy with tragedy. 🔊✎ all you need is a little nudge to set it going, anything will do, a glance at a girl you pass in the street who's lifting up her arms as you go by her, a feeling when you wake up in the morning that people aren't really treating you right, one question too many that you ask yourself late at night... 🔊✎ That's all. And then, you just need to let things happen. You can relax. It happens all by itself. It's a piece of precision engineered, well-oiled machinery. 🔊✎ Death is there, and treason and despair, all ready to use, and the outbursts, and the storms, and the silences, all the silences: the silence when the headsman raises his axe at the end, the silence at the beginning when the two lovers are naked in front of each other for the first time in the dark bedroom, without daring to move, the silence when the crowd's screams burst out around the conqueror and it's like a film where the sound has been cut, all those open mouths with nothing coming out, all that commotion which is just a picture, and the conqueror, who has already been conquered, alone in the middle of his silence... 🔊✎ Tragedy is clean. It's restful, it's reliable... 🔊✎ In drama, with its traitors, its sneering villains, its damsels in distress, its sudden discoveries, its acts of revenge, its gleams of hope, it would be horrible to die, it would just be an accident. Maybe you could have been saved, the young hero might have arrived in time with the cavalry. 🔊✎ But tragedy is peaceful. It all stays in the family, in the end everyone is innocent. It's not a question of who kills and who gets killed, it's just a matter of how to share out the parts. 🔊✎ And above all, tragedy is calm, because you know there's no hope, no filthy hope; you're caught, in the end you're caught like a rat, with the whole sky that's fallen on you, and all you can do is scream, not groan or complain, but scream at the top of your lungs all the things you have to say, which you've never said and maybe didn't even know you had in you. It won't help: but you do it for yourself, to learn something. 🔊✎ In a drama, you fight back because you hope to escape. It's vulgar, you just want to turn a profit. Tragedy is for free. 🔊✎ It's like being a king. And in the end, there is nothing you need to try. 🔊✎
Enter Antigone, pushed along by the guards. ✎
THE CHORUS ✎ —And so, it starts. 🔊✎ Little Antigone has been captured. 🔊✎ Little Antigone is going to be able to be herself for the first time in her life. 🔊✎
The chorus disappears, while the guards push Antigone onto the stage. ✎