Drama
- Felix Mendelssohn composed a suite of incidental music for Ludwig Tieck's staging of the play in 1841. It includes an overture and seven choruses.
- Walter Hasenclever wrote an adaptation in 1917, inspired by the events of World War I.
- Jean Cocteau created an adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone at Théâtre de l'Atelier in Paris on December 22, 1922.
- French playwright Jean Anouilh's tragedy Antigone was inspired by both Sophocles' play and the myth itself. Anouilh's play premièred in Paris at the Théâtre de l'Atelier in February 1944, during the Nazi occupation of France.
- Right after World War II, Bertolt Brecht composed an adaptation, Antigone, which was based on a translation by Friedrich Hölderlin and was published under the title Antigonemodell 1948.
- The Haitian writer and playwright Félix Morisseau-Leroy translated and adapted Antigone into Haitian Creole under the title, Antigòn (1953). Antigòn is noteworthy in its attempts to insert the lived religious experience of many Haitians into the content of the play through the introduction of several Loa from the pantheon of Haitian Vodou as voiced entities throughout the performance.
- Antigone inspired the 1967 Spanish-language novel La tumba de Antígona (English title: Antigone's Tomb) by María Zambrano.
- Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rafael Sánchez's 1968 play La Pasión según Antígona Pérez sets Sophocles' play in a contemporary world where Creon is the dictator of a fictional Latin American nation, and Antígona and her 'brothers' are dissident freedom fighters.
- The Island, a 1973 apartheid-era play by the South African playwrights Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Nthsona, features two cellmates who rehearse and ultimately perform Antigone for the other prisoners, drawing parallels between Antigone herself and black political prisoners held in Robben Island prison.
- In 1977, Antigone was translated into Papiamento for an Aruban production by director Burny Every together with Pedro Velásquez and Ramon Todd Dandaré. This translation retains the original iambic verse by Sophocles.
- Antigona Furiosa, written in the period of 1985-86 by Griselda Gambaro, is an Argentinian drama heavily influenced by Antigone by Sophocles, and comments on an era of government terrorism that later transformed into the Dirty War of Argentina.
- In 2004, theatre companies Crossing Jamaica Avenue and The Women's Project in New York City co-produced the Antigone Project written by Tanya Barfield, Karen Hartman, Chiori Miyagawa, Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage and Caridad Svich, a five-part response to Sophocles' text and to the US Patriot Act. The text was published by NoPassport Press as a single edition in 2009 with introductions by classics scholar Marianne McDonald and playwright Lisa Schlesinger.
- Bangladeshi director Tanvir Mokammel in his 2008 film Rabeya (The Sister) also draws inspiration from Antigone to parallel the story to the martyrs of the 1971 Bangladeshi Liberation War who were denied a proper burial.[24]
- In 2000, Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani and poet José Watanabe adapted the play into a one-actor piece that remains as part of the group's repertoire.[25]
- An Iranian absurdist adaptation of Antigone was written and directed by Homayoun Ghanizadeh and staged at the City Theatre in Tehran in 2011.[26]
- In 2012, the Royal National Theatre adapted Antigone to modern times. Directed by Polly Findlay,[27] the production transformed the dead Polynices into a terrorist threat and Antigone into a "dangerous subversive."[28]
- Roy Williams's 2014 adaptation of Antigone for the Pilot Theatre relocates the setting to contemporary street culture.[29]
- Syrian playwright Mohammad Al-Attar adapted Antigone for a 2014 production at Beirut, performed by Syrian refugee women.[30]
- Antigone in Ferguson is an adaptation conceived in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown by police in 2014, through a collaboration between Theater of War Productions and community members from Ferguson, Missouri. Translated and directed by Theater of War Productions Artistic Director Bryan Doerries and composed by Phil Woodmore.[31]
- Elena Carapetis' rewritten version, described as a response to the original, portrays a feminist theme. It was produced by the State Theatre Company of South Australia in Adelaide in June 2022, directed by Anthony Nicola.[32]
- Antigone in the Amazon (premiered March 2023), a performance that combines storytelling, music, and film to create a political performance, by Belgian theatre-maker Milo Rau.[33][34][35] [36]
Opera
- Antigone, opera by Arthur Honegger, premiered on December 28, 1927, at Théâtre de la Monnaie in Bruxelles.
- Antigonae, opera by Carl Orff, a Literaturoper, which uses Friedrich Hölderlin's translation of Sophokles' drama (1805), premiered on August 8, 1949, at the Felsenreitschule in the context of Salzburg Festival.
- Antigone (1977) by Dinos Constantinides, on an English libretto by Fitts and Fitzgerald
- Antigone (1986) by Marjorie S. Merryman
- Antigone oder die Stadt (1988) by Georg Katzer with a libretto by Gerhard Müller, premiered at the Komische Oper Berlin in 1991, staged by Harry Kupfer and conducted by Jörg-Peter Weigle
- The Burial at Thebes (2007–2008) by Dominique Le Gendre and libretto by Seamus Heaney, based on his translation for spoken theatre. The production features conductor William Lumpkin, stage director Jim Petosa, and six singers and ten instrumentalists.[37]
- Antigone (2020) oratory composed by Samy Moussa with stage direction and choreography by Nanine Linning, premiered on March 9, 2024 at the Dutch National Opera & Ballet in conjunction with Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927)
Literature
In 2017 Kamila Shamsie published Home Fire, which transposes some of the moral and political questions in Antigone into the context of Islam, ISIS and modern-day Britain.
2023 saw bestselling author Veronica Roth publish a speculative fiction version of Antigone, Arch-Conspirator, which explores concepts of gender equity, reproductive rights, and the loss of freedoms under self-righteous tyranny.
Cinema
George Tzavellas adapted the play into a 1961 film, which he also directed. It featured Irene Papas as Antigone.
Liliana Cavani's 1970 I Cannibali is a contemporary political fantasy based upon the Sophocles play, with Britt Ekland as Antigone and Pierre Clémenti as Tiresias.
The 1978 omnibus film Germany in Autumn features a segment by Heinrich Böll entitled "The Deferred Antigone"[38] where a fictional production of Antigone is presented to television executives who reject it as "too topical".[39]
A 2019 Canadian film adaption transposed the story into one of a modern-day immigrant family in Montreal. It was adapted and directed by Sophie Deraspe, with additional inspiration from the Death of Fredy Villanueva. Antigone was played by Nahéma Ricci.
Television
Vittorio Cottafavi directed two television productions of the play, in 1958 for RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana and in 1971 for Rai 1. Valentina Fortunato and Adriana Asti, respectively, performed the title role.
It was filmed for Australian TV in 1966.
In 1986, Juliet Stevenson starred as Antigone, with John Shrapnel as Creon and John Gielgud as Tiresias in the BBC's The Theban Plays.
Antigone at the Barbican was a 2015 filmed-for-TV version of a production at the Barbican directed by Ivo van Hove; the translation was by Anne Carson and the film starred Juliette Binoche as Antigone and Patrick O'Kane as Kreon.
Other TV adaptations of Antigone have starred Irene Worth (1949) and Dorothy Tutin (1959), both broadcast by the BBC.
