Output details

A tragédia de Ismene, princesa de Tebas

Play script

My concerns in writing The Tragedy of Ismene, Princess of Thebes were thematic: I was interested in the figure of the tragic hero and her relation to fate. I seek to give voice to those characters who are forgotten, whose actions allow them to survive without a ’heroic‘ death—envisaging, in other words, a Chekhovian Greek Tragedy. The play investigates the story of Antigone's sister Ismene, a minor character in the Theban dramatic and mythological canon, shifting perspectives and telling her story ten years after Antigone's death, when the city is again under attack.

Notions of heroism and sacrifice are refocused and refracted through the lenses of theatre's 2500 years of history that separate me from the first dramatists treating the subject (although the narrative still takes place in mythical times).

As well as the Greeks (Sophocles, Euripides and the contemporary Giannis Ritsos) who dealt with the Theban myth, I went to Chekhov and Shakespeare for inspiration, and sampled their words. The play is thus an experiment in form: the abundant use of found text needed to be normalised into a coherent dramatic language. Written in verse, with no punctuation, it explores the limits of intertextuality and is part of my research into translation and adaptation, having been originally assembled in English (see portfolio) and subsequently written and published in Brazilian Portuguese. Thus adapted and re-inscribed, the text might be described as offering a contemporary tragic sensibility in a format that is simultaneously new and archaic.

The publication in 2013 of this work contributes to the establishment of a contemporary canon of Brazilian dramaturgy in print. The text is now to be adopted in literature courses in two Brazilian universities (UERJ and UFMG) and has been the subject of academic papers (see portfolio).