How do you breathe new life into an ancient Greek tragedy? If anyone can, then it’s Juliette Binoche and Ivo van Hove. The actor and the director talk to Charlotte Higgins about the personal tragedies that fed into their production

Patrick O’Kane, the actor who is playing Creon in Ivo van Hove’s production of Sophocles’s Antigone, is waiting for the working day to begin in a London rehearsal room, watching Andy Murray on his phone in the Australian Open. How do you find Van Hove, I ask. “Impish,” he returns. Indeed, across the room Van Hove and Juliette Binoche lark about, two slender slips of people erupting in laughter. Van Hove is trim and be-cardiganed, Binoche is in jeans and high-heel boots and a sweatshirt that looks incredibly casual but is in fact by Isabel Marant, reminding me that not 48 hours ago she was in the front row at the Armani show at the Palais de Tokyo and is an Oscar-winning star (in 1996 for The English Patient) with a film career spanning from the Three Colours trilogy of the early 1990s through work with Haneke, Cronenberg and Kiarostami.

Two and a half years ago, Binoche and Van Hove met at a restaurant at the Gare de Lyon to discuss working together. Van Hove is hugely admired for his ability to excavate psychology and bring plays to the stage with a fresh, breakneck force. A regular visitor to the Barbican with his company Toneelgroep Amsterdam with such productions as The Roman Tragedies in 2009, he cemented his British reputation with last year’s production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge at the Young Vic in London, which is now playing in the West End (as well as in cinemas on 26 March). One director described Van Hove’s work to me this way: “Often in British theatre, the director and actors have decided that John Proctor is a good man, Abigail Williams is a bad woman [to take the example of Miller’s The Crucible]. But when you watch a Van Hove production, it is clear that Eddie Carbone [in a View from the Bridge] knows he is right. The Sicilians know they are right. There isn’t this sense of the play having been agreed on.” Binoche, for her part, was keen to return to the theatre after Mademoiselle Julie, a version of the Strindberg play that she brought to the Barbican in 2012.

The pair’s immediate idea was to investigate Greek tragedy. “It’s the myths, it’s the archetypes, it’s what we’re made of – it’s the big and simple questions that we all go through,” says Binoche, slapping the table in her enthusiasm. There is perhaps also the fact that there are some great roles for women – Medea, Clytemnestra, Electra, for example. “I insisted a little bit on Antigone,” says Binoche of Sophocles’s heroine, who propels the tragedy through her insistence on burying the body of her brother Polynices, in defiance of the edict of her uncle Creon, the new king of Thebes.

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They persuaded the Canadian poet-classicist Anne Carson to create a text for them, and her deft and elegant new translation promises to be one of the real pleasures of the show, which opens at the Barbican in London before a 10-month tour with stops at the Edinburgh international festival and at BAM in New York. It is pared back, “bones and skin”, in Binoche’s words, yet palpably produced by someone with a lifetime’s marination in the text (in 2012, she also published a more personal version of the play, called Antigonick). At one point Carson produces the memorable line “archives of grief I see falling on this house”. The original Greek refers to “ancient calamities that are heaped upon the calamities of the dead”. The “archive” metaphor – original yet absolutely fitting – perhaps suggested itself to Carson because of its similarity to the word Sophocles uses for ancient, “archaia”.

And this is indeed a play that dives into “archives of grief”. Antigone’s storyline continues that of Sophocles’s plays concerning Oedipus, her father. Oedipus the King (c430 BC) ends with the revelation that he killed his father and married his mother. Jocasta, his wife-mother, kills herself; he puts out his eyes. Oedipus at Colonus (in fact the last of the plays to be premiered, in 401 BC) concerns Oedipus’s death in exile, accompanied by his daughters Antigone and Ismene, just as his two sons, Eteocles and Polynices are on the brink of war for possession of Thebes. At the start of Antigone (c441 BC), the brothers have, the previous night, slaughtered each other during Polynices’ siege of Thebes, leaving Creon, Jocasta’s brother, as ruler. Van Hove and Binoche found themselves drawn to rereading Oedipus at Colonus, and, says Van Hove of Antigone, “It was for me very obvious that this woman was in deep mourning. She has lost her mother, she lost her father, and now she lost her two brothers. That’s for me the starting point.”

The play has, in its time, come to represent a rather binary interaction: that of state authoritarianism, represented by Creon, versus personal resistance, embodied by Antigone. In fact the drama – especially as illuminated by Carson’s translation – offers up more complex readings, not least Creon and Antigone’s entanglement in their own family relationship. Creon himself, points out Van Hove, has lost a son, Megareus, in the siege. “You see two people reacting totally differently to death.” Creon’s impulse is to look to the rule of law: “After all these years of atrocities and civil wars, he says that citizenship should now be the first priority.” He is saying, according to Van Hove, “that we have to go on somehow, but in a better way. That’s how I see him. I don’t see him as a tyrant at all.” (“You bastard!” interjects Binoche, in mock fury, at this point. “You see, she became like Antigone almost immediately,” Van Hove returns.) Van Hove’s production of A View From the Bridge had something of the feel of a Greek tragedy about it, in its starkness and feeling of onrush towards disaster. “Yes,” says Van Hove. “That play, which is a domestic drama, I turned into a Greek tragedy. Now, with a Greek tragedy, I am trying to humanise it.”

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Both actor and director, meantime, have found a fresh and harsh significance in the burial of the dead: Binoche has been considering the agonies that accompanied the burials of the Paris terrorists, interred in unmarked graves. For Van Hove, the resonance is deeply personal: one of the members of Toneelgroep was aboard the Malaysian Airlines flight shot down over eastern Ukraine in summer 2014. One week his colleague was DJing at a party to celebrate the company’s adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. The next he was “just laying somewhere in a field ... for over a week, in summer, in sun, rotting. The Dutch did something beautiful which Antigone does here. After two weeks, they brought the bodies to Eindhoven. There was a hearse for everybody, and they were driven through the whole country. The highways were lined with people. It was a huge showing of humanity: that you show respect to the dead. For me it suddenly became totally real.”

For all the attractions of directing Greek plays, they present problems for directors attempting to make them speak to a modern audience. The first problem: what to do about the chorus? The second: what to do about the gods? Sometimes this is solved by essentially ignoring these aspects of the plays and focusing on the conflicts between the principal characters. Van Hove, however, takes a different view. Although his chorus will not be of “the old men of Thebes” as prescribed in the text, “they are at the core of my production, and for me almost like the subconscious of the society.” He is fascinated by their reactiveness, the way they change their views in the light of events. “If you are not interested in the chorus as a director, better take your hands off a Greek tragedy. Better not do it,” he says.

What of the gods? No actual deity treads the stage, but the uncanny and the divine are strong forces in the play. As Binoche points out, from the start there is the feeling that Antigone’s “relationship with the invisible world is already strong. Somehow she already has an inside contact, as if she is already living with the dead, has a strong relationship with the gods. For her there is no boundary: the visible and invisible worlds are almost the same.” The morning we spoke, Van Hove was about to start working on O’Kane’s scene with the seer Tiresias, in which the beyond-human aspects of the play are made palpable. Van Hove is still wrestling with it, he says. “There is so much to think about in this play. We have to make it into something gripping and moving and frightening and, also, hopeful. It’s for me full of unanswerable questions: that’s what mesmerises me. And that’s what my task is, to make sense of this, so you come out and think: ‘Wow, what did I just see?’”

• Antigone is at Barbican, London EC2, 4-28 March. Details: barbican.org.uk

NOTE: This article was amended on 19 February 2015 to correctly name the character played by Patrick O’Kane.

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