← Her name is Antigone and she has to play her role through to the end. 🔊✎
← It begins at the moment when the two sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, who were supposed to take turns ruling Thebes one year at a time, fought each other to the death under the walls of the city, because Eteocles, the older one, had at the end of his first year of power refused to give up his place to his brother. 🔊✎
← (She ends in such a tone of despair that Haemon obeys her and moves away.) ✎
← 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... 🔊✎
← You're there, you're drinking in my words. And if you don't call your guards, it's so that you can hear me out to the end. 🔊✎
← And as soon as he was with the Argives, the assassination attempts started against your father, against an old man who hadn't decided to die and hand over his kingdom. One attempt after another, and when we caught one of the hitmen they always ended up saying they'd been paid by him. Though not just by him, I might add. 🔊✎
← I understand you., I would have done the same when I was twenty. That's why I kept listening to your words. I saw at the other end of time a little Creon, thin and pale like you are, who also kept thinking of sacrificing himself... 🔊✎
← Antigone is at the far end of the tomb. She has hanged herself with her belt of blue and green and red cords, which looks like a child's necklace on her, and Haemon, kneeling, holds her in his arms and groans, his face buried in her gown. They move away another block and Creon can finally enter. You see his white hair in the shadows in the depths of the cave. He tries to raise up Haemon, he begs him. 🔊✎
← But Haemon looks at him with his child's eyes, heavy with contempt, and Creon cannot avoid his gaze that cuts him like a knife. Haemon stares at the old man trembling at the other end of the cavern and then, without saying anything, he plunges the sword into his stomach and stretches himself out beside Antigone, kissing her in the middle of a huge pool of blood. 🔊✎