Carlota Subirós resurrects Oedipus and Antigone to explore present-day migrations

BarcelonaThe Great Hall of the National Theatre of Catalonia (TNC) will host, from April 22 to May 31, Oedipus and Antigone with a Catalan company formed mainly by racialized performers. This is a sadly unusual situation that the director of the show, Carlota Subirós, wanted to break. "It's the first time my son has seen this in the thirty years I've been working," says actress Vicenta Ndongo, pointing to the show's poster, with the photograph of Kathy Sey and Babou Cham. "We have a very whitewashed image of classical Greece. We have constructed the fallacy that Europe is white. It wasn't in its origin and it isn't today," Subirós adds.

With this approach, the director revisits two of the great foundational myths of Western culture – through the plays Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone by Sophocles – through a version that brings them closer to our present. "They are three plays with a very strong political and spiritual value. There have been infinite versions and rewrites, and their words still reverberate with great force," Subirós emphasizes. The seed of the project sprouted during the creation process of her previous production, The Diamond Square. "Working with Kathy Sey, I had a very strong vision of her playing an extraordinary Antigone. From then on, I didn't talk about shooting images," recalls the director.

As she did in the adaptation of Mercè Rodoreda's work, Subirós plays with the text's choral nature on stage. Sey embodies Antigone and Babou Cham plays Oedipus, but the director has opted to work on "the collective voice and its power to resonate throughout a community," she adds. For the texts – which are performed all three in succession, without an intermission, in a show lasting 2 hours and 20 minutes – she has chosen the prose translations by Carles Riba. "I have made a free adaptation in the sense that I have cut text and clarified it for the audience of 2026, maintaining Riba's dense, rich, and poetic Catalan, at the temperature of Greek tragedy," says Subirós.

"A feeling of disappointment"

This version of Oedipus and Antigone is brought to our present day from the story of a family that is banished and ends up arriving in Athens. "Working on the play, I have seen the immensity of the themes that were relevant 2,500 years ago and are still the same today," points out Kathy Sey. Along the same lines, actor Moha Amazian (who plays Tiresias) says he experienced "a feeling of disappointment when reading the text and seeing that we have learned nothing".

is the explosion of the entire stage set".

All of them act in a scenic space designed by Max Glaenzel with the collaboration of Josep Iglesias. "We have tried to create a resonance box from the audience to the stage. The show begins in a space very close to the spectators, breaking the barrier – describes Subirós–. In Oedipus at Colonus a little more depth is opened up and a more magical and evocative space is created, linked to the idea of blindness and banishment. And Antigone is the explosion of the entire scenic box".