If you look at the list of characters, you will see at the bottom Nick, a mute part [always onstage, he measures things] and the final line of the play instructs all the cast to leave the stage apart from Nick who continues to measure. Like all great Greek classics, the stories can be modernized and adjusted to new conditions to say new things. Her poetry is expressionistic (you see this in Antigonick ), shot through with a spiritual turbulence and an almost violent sensitivity to experience, and the barbed edges of her lines can send shocks through you. Despite these strictures, I thought this version is worth reading and at its best (again like Pound) points the way to a form of poetic diction which can be an effective solution, or partial solution, to the notoriously intractable problem of presenting the mood of ancient tragedy to a modern audience. The print is in the form of Carson's own handwriting, with little or no punctuation, giving the tale a frantic, nervous feel.

Antigonick is a comic-book presentation of Sophokles’ Antigone in a new translation by Anne Carson, with text blocks hand-inked on the page by Carson and her collaborator Robert Currie. Meant to be inhaled in one sitting, Carson’s version has a radical minimalism, a thrilling strangeness, in design as well as content. It's sad that the pictures, by Bianca Stone, don't try to either work with the text, or against it; it's sad Stone seems to think that this kind of freedom is both expressive and appropriate; it's sad that Carson chose this artist for the project: but worst of all is that reviewers, with almost no exceptions that I could find, think the images are interesting, good, and even profound. Carson's play was adapted with collaborator Robert Currie, and is accompanied by translucent vellum pages with drawings by Bianca Stone. Her Antigone is up against a ruler who is not only blundering and brutal but misogynistic and crass.

Bianca Stone's illustrations are a surreal assortment of images, printed on transparent pages that overlay the text, and which relate only occasionally to what is happening in the text. Antigonick is her first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience: it will provoke poetry readers, classical scholars, theatre people and comic-book aficionados. He makes certain changes, some lines and scenes are dropped, the play is prefaced with an inserted great dialogue between two unnamed sisters in Berlin in the final days of WW2, but nonetheless Sophocles' text is very much recognizable, showing what a great adaptation is about, something in which Carson fails.

We readers know from the beginning, of course, that Kreon's speech is just empty words, and that he will soon discover this for himself. If the comic effect is unintentional, it's inept; if intentional, it's a joke few members of a contemporary audience are going to get. I see the GR reviews admiring passages like these but wonder whether most of them read Sophocles or adaptations like the one by Brecht. That could also be true, if the illustrations were done in such a way that viewers knew those two themes were intended.It is probably a great work of art in itself, but for me, coming from a love for the original drama and story, it didn’t feel like ‘Antigone’ to me.