Bakkhai

Anne Carson's translation of Sophokles' Antigone received its world premiere at Grand Theatre de Luxembourg, in collaboration with the Barbican in London, starring Juliette Binoche and directed by Ivo van Hove; the production will tour throughout Europe and the United States. Anne is currently adapting The Bakkhai for the Almeida. Classic Stage Company in New York has produced Anne Carson's An Oresteia (a trilogy adapted from Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Electra and Euripides' Orestes) in repertory. Works include: Autobiography of Red; Red Doc> ; Antigonick; Nox; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (translation); The Beauty of the Husband; Men in the Off Hours; Economy of the Unlost; Plainwater: Essays and Poetry; Glass, Irony and God; Eros the Bittersweet: AnEssay; Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera; Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (translation). Carson is a MacArthur Fellow; she has received the Lannan Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize (twice-awarded), and was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany.

This second drama in the Almeida's vital Greek season is not a revolutionary re-ordering... It does, though, cleverly refocus the play. Anne Carson, the superb Canadian poet who has provided a fine translation, is a classicist. No one is likely to quarrel with her interpretation. And no one could dispute the suppleness of her verse, which moves from teasing demotic bathos... to tumbling lyric waterfalls and an extraordinary, jazz-like swing for the Chorus. When you look at the lines on the page, squeezing and fanning out, you can almost hear the pulse.