Cutting the Chorus
A school is entering a 55-minute adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone in a drama festival. There are eight actors, no masks, modern dress, and a single set. The director wants to cut the Chorus's 'Ode to Man' and the scene with Teiresias in order to keep the focus on the confrontation between Antigone and Creon. A student who studies Classical Studies is asked to advise. She knows that the festival judges will reward 'clarity of through-line' but also that the play's meaning depends on more than the two central characters. The director argues that the Ode is 'just poetry' and that Teiresias is 'a plot device.' The student has to decide which cut, if either, is acceptable, and to propose a staging solution that preserves the play's dramatic logic within the time limit. She must also explain her reasoning to a director who has not read the play.
1. What does the Ode to Man contribute to the play's argument, and what is lost if it is cut?
Read the worked answer
The Ode to Man is not decorative. It sets out a vision of human skill and control: man sails the sea, tills the earth, hunts, domesticates animals, uses language and law. It then names the limit: death is unavoidable, and the man who uses law for evil is a threat to the city. It frames the action as a contest between human competence and divine law. Creon's confidence in his own edict is exactly the 'cleverness' the Ode examines.
Cutting it leaves the audience with a personal quarrel between Antigone and Creon and loses the play's political and theological frame. The Ode also provides choral distance: it invites the audience to judge Creon's claim to speak for the city. Without it, Creon can seem merely a stubborn antagonist rather than a man whose view of law is philosophically wrong. The director's phrase 'just poetry' misunderstands how Greek tragedy argues through lyric. The chorus is not an interval; it is part of the argument.
2. How does the Teiresias scene change Creon's trajectory, and what happens to the ending if it is removed?
Read the worked answer
Teiresias is the turning point. He reports that the gods reject Creon's offerings because of the unburied Polyneices and predicts that Creon will pay 'corpse for corpse.' Until this scene, Creon has resisted Antigone and Haemon on human grounds; Teiresias adds divine sanction. His warning produces Creon's reversal: the chorus advises him to bury Polyneices and free Antigone, and he goes, too late.
If the scene is cut, Creon's change of mind has no adequate cause; it looks like a sudden mood swing. The ending - Haemon's suicide, Eurydice's death, Creon's ruin - then feels arbitrary rather than consequential. Teiresias also links the play to the Oedipus story and to the city's pollution, which the director may want to keep. A 'plot device' is doing real structural work: it converts Creon from confident ruler to suppliant. Removing it would solve a timing problem by creating a dramatic one.
3. Propose a concrete compromise for the 55-minute production that addresses the director's concerns.
Read the worked answer
Keep both elements but shrink them. Cut the Ode to Man to three or four choral lines, delivered by the whole ensemble as a rhythmic movement rather than a static song; this preserves the human-limit theme and gives the eight actors a strong visual sequence. Keep Teiresias but reduce his speech to the essential prophecy in about 12 lines, with the chorus taking some of his lines as a whispered relay. Alternatively, present Teiresias as a voice from the audience or in a single spotlight, which is cheap and eerie. Use the saved time to strengthen the Antigone–Creon confrontations.
This answers the director's real concern - pace and focus - without removing the play's causal logic. The student should explain that the cuts are not equal: the Ode can be compressed because its function is thematic; Teiresias cannot be removed because his function is causal. The compromise also gives the festival judges a clear through-line without pretending that the play is only a two-character debate.