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From Movement to Meaning: Inside Antigone with Nigel Poulton
By Nigel Poulton, Co-DIrector
Antigone marks my first time directing a mainstage production, and it has been a wonderful opportunity to bring together strands of my practice developed across theatre, film, opera, and training contexts. It also represents a continuation of a longer inquiry that has shaped my work: an ongoing exploration of Theatrical Biomechanics, action-based performance, and contemporary actor training, and how physical language, efficiency, and clarity of action generate meaning onstage.
I’ve remained deeply interested in the body as a site of decision and consequence — how action, restraint, rhythm, and physical commitment shape narrative and ethics. Antigone is a play where those questions feel urgently alive. Rather than approaching the work psychologically, our process has focused on what characters do, what they refuse to do, and the physical cost of those choices. Sophocles’ world is governed by law, ritual, and inevitability, and we have treated the body as subject to those forces — constrained, compelled, resisting, completing. The physical life of the production emerges from clear rules and provocations: who may move, who must stop, who completes an action, and who attempts to fix the world in place.
It is a genuine pleasure to be back at La Boite, which holds a special place in my heart. Some of my most formative and memorable artistic experiences have happened here, and the company played a significant role in my early development as an artist. I am equally grateful to be undertaking this project with Courtney, with whom I share a long and deeply valued collaboration, and whom I admire greatly as both an artist and an artistic leader.
This approach has allowed us to explore Antigone not as an abstract moral debate, but as a lived, embodied collision between duty, authority, love, and mortality. In 2026, that collision feels anything but distant.
La Boite Theatre presents
ANTIGONE
5 to 21 March 2026
Roundhouse Theatre, La Boite
Recommended for audiences aged 15+. Contains references to death, dying and infanticide.