Ancient, Urgent, Now: Courtney Stewart on ANTIGONE
Opening its 2026 season with Sophocles’ ANTIGONE, La Boite Theatre signals a bold and purposeful beginning to the year. One of the most enduring tragedies of the classical canon, ANTIGONE has long been a story about resistance, power, and the moral choices individuals face when authority demands obedience. Yet in this new staging, the ancient text is treated not as a distant relic, but as a living conversation with the present moment.
Co-directed by the company’s Artistic Director, Courtney Stewart alongside Nigel Poulton, the production places audiences in the round, transforming the theatre into a shared civic arena. This design choice echoes the democratic impulses at the heart of the play, inviting audiences to sit within the conflict rather than observe it from a distance. As questions of authority, justice, and personal conscience echo through the text, the staging seeks to create a space where viewers confront their own responses to the tensions unfolding on stage.
Opening your 2026 season with ANTIGONE feels like a statement of intent. What are you declaring, artistically and politically, by placing this story first in the year?
Opening the 2026 season with ANTIGONE is about leaning into theatre as a space for public reckoning. This has also inspired our decision to have this production performed in the round, we wanted to create a truly democratic space for our audiences to engage with this story.
You’ve described the work as both ancient and shockingly current. In rehearsal, where did you most viscerally feel that collision between classical text and contemporary reality?
Creon has a particularly poignant line in scene three where he says “whoever is chosen to govern should be obeyed, must be obeyed, in all things, great and small, just and unjust!” This line stings for me, this is what is being demanded from citizens across the world. Our hope is that we’ve created a space where our audiences honestly check back in with themselves, check their moral compass, and remind them of their personal agency.
Antigone’s defiance is often framed as heroic. In your staging, are you more interested in her courage, her recklessness, or the cost of her conviction?
I would say a nuanced combination of all three of these framings are layered one on the top of the other. Courage comes with a dash of recklessness; to live out your convictions, particularly in the face of immovable forces requires courage. ANTIGONE isn’t perfect, she’s scrappy and messy and has to keep making her decision every moment she is challenged, but that’s what makes this story both timeless and thrilling.
You are co-directing with Nigel Poulton, whose background is deeply physical and movement-driven. How has that shifted your own directing language, especially in moments where text traditionally dominates?
Nigel and I have a long history of collaborating together, so I think what this process has allowed us a closer meshing of our practices. We both have a passion for physical storytelling, and Nigel’s specific process of implementing Theatrical Biomechanics has been a fascinating foundation to our production.
Silence can be more destabilising than speech. What have you discovered about the audience’s psychological response when you allow stillness to hold the stage?
It’s so interesting because this was a big thing we discussed in the rehearsal room. Brady (Watkins) and I have worked on a super punchy edit of the text, which has allowed us to explore what pushing the limits of the length of the silences can do to the meaning of the work and the comprehension of the text. It’s in these crafted silences that we see Creon falter, stumble, crack, we see Antigone rise, resolve, act, we see Haimon question, detach, resist. It allows us to find the nuances and contemporary versions of these ancient characters.
The production opens on the eve of International Women’s Day. How consciously have you engaged with that framing, and how do you avoid reducing ANTIGONE to a symbolic gesture rather than a fully complex human being?
Opening near International Women’s Day is absolutely resonant, but we’ve been careful to let ANTIGONE’s complexity lead all of our choices around this production. She’s not a symbol or an archetype, but rather a complicated, conflicted person who is grappling with grief and acting in the best way she knows how. We’ve interrogated absolutely every line, every choice, and paid particular attention to the moments that feel they have an obvious “right” way to be interpreted. We’ve played with playing against those, to see what it breaks open in the work.
Creon is often portrayed as a tyrant, yet he also believes he is preserving order. In your interpretation, how do you navigate the tension between authoritarianism and perceived responsibility?
Our interpretation of Creon has been led by the amazing Hayden Spencer who plays this character. We have purposefully refused caricature and have crafted a balance point where Creon is both authoritarian and earnest in his sense of responsibility; the tension isn’t solved, it is lived, exposing the frailty in conviction and the peril in certainty. We have relished the moments of finding and pushing Creon’s vulnerability.
You’ve spoken about stripping back the text to make space for action. Was there a moment in rehearsal where removing words revealed something more truthful than language ever could?
In the original final scene we are introduced to Eurydice and we then learn about the death of her son Haimon after a final fight with Creon. Our edit originally had a lot of that text still intact, however one session, we looked at a version where we stripped out all of the narration and exposition and instead showed the fight and subsequent death. It has made for a far more gripping and gut-punching end, as it gives our modern-day audiences the emotional hooks to invest in Creon’s downfall and unending grief as a result of his pride.
As Artistic Director, you balance creative authorship with institutional leadership. Does directing a story about moral resistance feel different when you are also leading the organisation staging it?
I mean I think those of us who choose making art as a vocation are by nature resistors, disrupters, change makers. My art-making practice and my leadership practice aren’t separate modes of thought for me. They are critically linked to each other. It’s a far bigger task trying to make work and run the organisation at the same time, but what’s amazing and important about having to do that is that the art and the organisation feel so deeply connected to each other.
1What do you hope audiences carry with them when they leave the Roundhouse, not just emotionally, but ethically? Should they feel galvanised, unsettled, implicated, or something else entirely?
My hope and dream is that audiences leave the Roundhouse not just feeling moved, but fired up to question their certainties, exercise their empathetic muscles and find the joy in bearing witness to our contemporary take on this unnervingly current classic.
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