SKIPTON poet, playwright and journalist Blake Morrison was asked if he could re-work one classical text for Northern Broadsides, what would it be?

"Antigone," came his reply. "It's a great play for our time, because it's set in the triumphalist aftermath of a brief but bloody war, and though I don't overdo the parallels with Iraq, no one could help but think of them."

Morrison wrote his contemporary take on Sophocles's 2,500-year-old Greek tragedy in the after-burn of the Iraqi conflict, and was asked by Northern Broadsides actor-manager Barrie Rutter to pepper his script with resonant phrases from the 2003 battleground. And so it is that self-appointed ruler Creon (Rutter) glories in victory by saying "we taught them shock and awe".

Just as John Arden's anti-war parable Serjeant Musgrave's Dance - this week's touring production at York Theatre Royal - has topicality anew with its story of British soldiers caught up in a faraway conflict, so Antigone has all the more impact in the week of President Bush's state visit.

Antigone takes the antagonistic form of a heated argument over the conflicting rights of family and state. In the Theban royal family corner - and what a complex, dysfunctional family it must be when your father is Oedipus and your brother has a thing for your mother - stands the stubborn firebrand, Antigone (Sally Carman). In the state corner is the dictator Creon, puffed up in his buttoned-up suit and tie pin.

She vows to defy his rule that she must not bury her brother, the traitorous leader of a failed rebellion; he responds by condemning her to death, and so state intransigence and bully-boy belligerence will have tragic consequence for family.

How resonant.

The role of referee and commentator goes to the seven-piece, all-male Chorus, who do not coerce Creon in the manner of the midnight hags in Macbeth but chip in with blunt northern advice. When Creon departs with a self-pitying "I am gone; I am no one", the Chorus barks back: "We won't stop you".

Such black, nonsense-shredding humour is but one winning element of Morrison's third collaboration with Northern Broadsides, where the frank and fiery dialogue has all the crunch of the cast's clogs and the clash of ideals never becomes bogged down in Greek drama's old enemy of reportage.

Rutter's bulging eyes and buffoonish ranting take him too close to caricature but Carman's knotted Antigone inflicts deep blisters with her intensely burning presence.

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Updated: 09:54 Thursday, November 20, 2003