Femme fatale  It has been seen as a parable for Nazi
collaborators, Irish Republicanism and now Iraq. Blake Morrison
explains the challenges of translating Antigone Tara Fitzgerald
(left) and Anna Calder-Marshall in the Old Vic's 1999 production
of Antigone. Photo: Tristram Kenton Guardian  Classics escape
the prison of time. Whichever their era, they belong to every
other era. People talk of "contemporary classics" but the phrase
is tautologous: classics are contemporary by definition. The bad
director of an ancient Greek tragedy batters us with parallels
to the present day; the good director lets the echoes
reverberate for themselves. The classic doesn't have a sell-by
date. If it did, it wouldn't be a classic.  I discovered this
two years ago, when drafting a new version of Sophocles's
Oedipus for Barrie Rutter's theatre company Northern Broadsides.
The opening lines of the play describe a plague afflicting
Thebes, and in the spring of 2001 Britain was struggling with a
plague of its own, the foot and mout