Antigone Exits review: bold ideas, uneven results in Chichester

Nina Segal's "Antigone Exits" runs at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, until 17 October, and it pours its libations in black tar. The sticky substance dribbles onto a bright yellow stage, forming a runny circle — an image of danger rather than reverence in a court where the dead are not honoured but policed.

The tar circle belongs to King Creon, played by Max Bennett. His condemnation of his niece Antigone (Nina Cassells) — punished for defying him by retrieving her brother's body for burial — is framed as an inability to question, let alone reconsider, his own laws. The circle becomes a dividing line between the hypothetically welcome and the unwelcome in Thebes. By the end, the line is crossed in more ways than one, and the oily substance spreads, smearing all those irrevocably affected by the mess.

What does Segal's version change?

Segal's revisiting of the Sophoclean tragedy is keen to explore the far-reaching consequences of our actions and their trickle-down effects. The approach is pleasingly experimental, but not all the ideas coalesce in Jeff James's production, which combines fourth-wall breaking with direct address until the boundaries blur past the point of coherence.

Cast members break away from their Greek characters to relay anecdotes that could well be their own. Reaching for a mic suspended above the stage:

• one performer tells of watching a fox decompose
• another recounts a husband's death
• another describes his teenage daughter's suicide

The stories are moving, even if their links to Antigone's own plight remain somewhat tenuous.

Why doesn't it fully land?

The production places its emphasis on emotions over actions, and that choice carries a cost. Having each key player describe their anger, fear or sadness — rather than showing us — produces a distancing effect that prevents the staging from striking the chords it might.

Watching the actors mine seemingly personal memories to find a connection to these centuries-old characters is, the review notes, "a little like watching a workshop in method acting." That observation cuts to the production's central tension: the machinery of feeling is on display, but the feeling itself stays at arm's length.

The strongest elements remain its visual logic — tar, yellow, the spreading stain — which do the tragic work the spoken confessions strain toward. Whether Segal and James's boundary-blurring strategy finds its audience before the 17 October close will test whether experimental form can carry a story this old without explaining itself.