Antigone buries the body of Polyneikes against the prohibition of Kreon (her uncle), the king of Thebes. Despite the warning of Tiresias, the seer, Kreon condemns his niece to starvation. She commits suicide in her dungeon after which her lover, Haimon (Kreon's son), stabs herself. This news reaches Euridyce, Kreon's wife, mother of Haimon, upon which she also takes her own life. Kreon is left behind.

Ensemble Leporello's musical theatre piece.
In 1991, after two months of rehearsals, Ensemble Leporello, in co-production with organisations at home and abroad, premiered “Satyr song Antigone”. The performance stood out for its curious blending of song, dance and spoken text.

A dozen figures (‘satyrs’) crowd on and around a wooden, man-powered merry-go-round. Just like at the fairground, the disc is on a slight incline so that the actors, by changing position and applying their body weight, make the thing turn. Accompanied by two percussionists and a soundtrack, they whisper, sing and recite fragments of text that all relate to the Antigone myth in one way or another. At times meticulous in their playing, at other times jumbled like skateboarders on a slope, the players perform a ritual in which the protagonists from Sophocles’ tragedy merely act as an occasion for choral speech and song. During that ceremony, some of the chorus members strip off their hats and gloves, and take on the role of one of the heroes in a key scene. Barely is such a scene gesuggeree'rd or the satyr-hero reappears with the others and merges into the chorus.

Percussion, singing voice, a carousel, props, gloves and hats.
Luc Brewaeys, the composer, who works closely with the Ensemble, provided this mishmash with an at times raw, ingenious score for voice, percussion and sound band. Dirk Opstaele, librettist and director, reworked a number of versions and side-versions of “Antigone” into a libretto that, as a script, underpins the whole project. Sophocles’ first stasimon - the ode to man - was chosen as the main choral song. The translation used is by “Hölderlin”, more Sofoklean than Sofokles himself. ‘Deinos’, meaning awesome, fearsome, mighty, is retranslated there to ‘Ungeheuer’: monstrous.
Besides a chair (the throne), a stick (the weapon with which Antigone's brothers stab each other), a veil (belonging to Kreon's wife), a glove (belonging to Antigone's lover), the wooden disc is the main prop. This little stage, six metres in diameter, is also reminiscent of the bottom arena of an amphitheatre: the flat earth disc that floated in the ancient cosmos between Tartaros and Olympos. In the actors' hands, it is a toy that unapologetically transforms the tragedy of the human condition into gravitational and centrifugal forces.

Jacques Servaes' film.
The libretto script was rewritten into a film script by Konrad Maquestieau and Jacques Servaes. The play was shortened and some scenes that make sense purely on a theatre scene were modified or replaced. The turntable is set in a black, abyssal hall and the satyrs, except when they take the camera aside for a moment to clarify the situation, hurl their expressions into the void.