It was probably a unique "correspondance des arts et des artistes" that was brought into the present day and, above all, thought of today would probably be a similar sensation, for example: Yasmina Reza would work on the Antigone material, Max Richter would compose the music, Gerhard Richter that Set design and Jean-Paul Gaultier would design the costumes, and Isabelle Huppert would be in the leading role, with Jonathan Meese perhaps in a supporting role.
What sounds crazy happened in December 1922!
Back then, at the world premiere of Jean Cocteau's "Antigone" in the Théâtre de l'Atelier, which was celebrating its hundredth anniversary these days, it was none other than Arthur Honegger (music), Coco Chanel (costumes) and Pablo Picasso (stage) who created a new Antigone with Cocteau.
Honegger would later deal extensively with the material and shortly afterwards composed an Antigone opera. Cocteau had previously worked with Picasso on the Erik Satie ballet “Parade”.
The theater and its double
The play is dedicated to the Romanian-French actress Génica Athanasiou, who was a star in the Parisian theater scene at the time and who herself played Antigone in the premiere.
Among the actors was also the radical theater maker and theorist Antonin Artaud in the role of the seer Tiresias, who was the main actress' life partner for some time.
One seems to recognize the influence of Artaud's programmatic writing "The Theater and its Double" in Cocteau's early work, who in turn played along, namely in the role of choir and choir leader reduced to one person.
Only the name of the director, Charles Dullin, is comparatively unknown today, which is hardly surprising when one knows how meticulously Cocteau himself controlled the production.
Jean Cocteau, who was seen as "the incarnation of the avant-garde" and "did not correct this error", as Frederick Brown put it in his 1985 biography, described his version of Antigone as a "contraction", i.e. a simple "foreshortening" of Sophocles -Dramas.
According to Cocteau himself, he wanted to create a par force version, breathless, without pauses, without the feeling of time passing, rigid in perspective and above all: without the possibility of long or lengthy reflections on the events.
Because: "If you know too much, poetry dies."
Impressive speed
Cocteau would later refer to this approach as the "Antigone method" and use it more often, not least in his successful novel and film "Les enfants terribles" (1950), which has become a colloquial expression, an incest drama with speed and tenderness that is still impressive today.
In Cocteau's further theater and then also film work, experimental aesthetics and Artaud's influence become increasingly clear (e.g. in: "Le sang d'un poète" from 1932).
In addition, there are more and more poetic-fairytale elements ("La Belle et la Bête", 1946) and mythological themes (example of this is perhaps his most beautiful film, which lets Orpheus enter the modern age in the form of Jean Marais: "Orphée", 1949). ).
Cocteau's version of Antigone, which was a great success in December 1922 due to the radical reduction and the fame of those involved and was also played abroad, was soon to be more or less replaced by the adaptations by Jean Anouilh (1944) and Bertolt Brecht (1948). fallen into oblivion.
It would be very attractive to stage Cocteau's compact version, which is therefore also accessible to the Netflix generation, again today - after all, not all the stars described at the beginning would have to be involved in the production.
In any case, it could be checked whether Cocteau's version still manages to implement his poetological program - namely to rescue people from the "ruins of their habits" so that they do not have to hear the words like Creon at the end of the play: "Trop tard, Créon, trop tard."