Theban Plays: Antigone

Constance is a bored, movie-loving schoolteacher in post-WW2 New Zealand who begins to fantasize that she's a Hollywood star - with tragic consequences.

Medea is a powerful witch who gets revenge on her cheating husband Jason by killing their children.

In 1960s Tokyo, Gonda owns a bar in which the gay, cross-dresser, and trans scenes meet. Gonda is in a relationship with the madam of the bar, Leda. As the younger Eddie starts a passionate affair with Gonda, she ignites the jealousy of Leda, unaware of another kind of history between them.

Set during the turbulent shift from silent to sound, this film intertwines the lives of a struggling filmmaker and a solitary fisherman. A meditation on creativity and change, this film explores the enduring value of artistic integrity in an ever-shifting world.

In the aftermath of the Trojan Wars, Queen Hecuba takes stock of the defeated kingdom. Her son has been killed, and his widow, Andromache, is left to raise their son, Astyanax, alone. Hecuba's daughter, Cassandra, fears being enslaved by her Greek masters, while Helen of Troy risks being executed. Astyanax also becomes the focus of the Greeks' attention as the last male heir of the Trojan royal family.

Living in exile after the death of their father, the grown children of a murdered and usurped king converge to exact eye-for-an-eye revenge.

Antigone asks the question of the difference between the spirit of the Law and the letter of the Law. This elemental ancient play about - honor, loyalty, love, betrayal and conviction - resonates as sharply and as damning today as it did when it was written 2,500 years ago.

Having defied the ban on Creon and offered a burial to Polynice, her treacherous homeland brother, Antigone is condemned to a slow death in a stone tomb, despite the interposition of Hémon, her fiance, the son of Creon . Nevertheless, Creon ends up following the advice of his diviner Tiresias and, fearing the wrath of the gods, buries Polynices with dignity. When he is about to free Antigone, the young woman had already hanged herself. Mad with pain, Hémon commits suicide by his side.

"Almost everything disappeared. How did it happen?" a man wonders on his deathbed. Elizabeth Lazebnik’s patient, poetic and supremely controlled film sensitively addresses the terrible thought that our pasts, our accomplishments, our families, and friends can be effaced by encroaching sickness and impending death.

“The Suppliants of Aeschylus were part of a trilogy consisting of Supplicants, Sons of Egypt and Danaids, followed by a satyr drama Amirnon. It was first performed at the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, probably in 463 BC."

This is a film of the 2013 Cambridge Greek Play production of Prometheus, presented at the Cambridge Arts Theatre.

A modern retelling of the Greek myth of Phaedra. The young and fiery second wife of an extremely wealthy shipping magnate meets her estranged stepson Alexis and sparks immediately fly. Their love seems doomed from the beginning when she convinces him to come to Paris to meet his father.

In a world where Greek mythology is reality, Ben, a lonely reporter, finds his morals swayed by his desperation for affection.

Based on the plot of Euripides' Medea. Medea centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed her for another woman.

The story of Oedipus' gradual discovery of his primal crime, killing his father and marrying his mother, filmed by the famed British theatrical director Sir Tyrone Guthrie. This elegant version of Sophocles' play adds a brilliant stroke: the actors wear masks just as the Greeks did in the playwright's day.