ALTHOUGH it draws visitors from around the world and is renowned for its theatre productions, the Edinburgh International Festival has not been overwhelmed by Oscar winners clamouring to appear during the annual event.

To date there has only been a handful – Burt Lancaster and Peter Ustinov among them.

Perhaps this will change with the appearance this year of double Oscar winner Juliet Binoche who has been hailed as one of the greatest living actresses in the world.

Despite lukewarm reviews of her performance in Antigone earlier this year, much excitement has been generated over her appearance in Edinburgh where the play opened on Saturday and runs until August 22 at the King’s Theatre.

The French actress flew into Scotland last week and candidly admitted to reporters that she had never heard of the festival until she was asked to appear in Antigone.

It was enough to make a chorus of Mornignside ladies choke on their scones but she did redeem herself slightly by adding she was “thrilled” to be here.

“Now that I am aware that there is a festival here – I wasn’t aware before – I will definitely come back,” she said.

TRAGEDY

Whether audiences will be thrilled by acclaimed director Ivo van Hove’s interpretation of Antigone is another matter.

It is not a bundle of laughs but it is a Greek tragedy and holding true to the tradition, van Hove has not gone out of his way to make it any cheerier.

“It’s about helpless humans lost in the cosmos,” he said.

Unlike Binoche, van Hove has been at the festival before, making his debut in 1998.

Since then he has become one of the most acclaimed directors in Europe and the US. His recent productions of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge have won praise from critics and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

His Antigone uses a new translation by Anne Carson and, as well as Binoche, stars Obi Abili, Kirsty Bushell, Samuel Edward-Cook, Finbar Lynch, Patrick O’Kane and Kathryn Pogson.

Produced by the Barbican and Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, in association with Toneelgroep Amsterdam, it is co-produced by Edinburgh International Festival and Théâtre de la Ville – Paris and Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen.

After Edinburgh, the play goes on to Paris, Recklinghausen and New York.

It will be an exhausting period of work for 50-year-old Binoche who takes three hours each day to prepare for the evening performances and describes the play as “intense”.

However, she is known more for her films (Chocolat, The English Patient, Three Colours: Blue & Damage) than her theatre work.

GENIUS

While the play was written by Sophocles around 440BC it has relevance for today under any interpretation particularly, perhaps, for a Tory government that seems hellbent on sticking to their rules no matter how it affects the individual lives of their citizens.

Binoche, indeed, has said the “genius” play has relevance not just for the UK but for Europe’s current treatment of austerity-hit Greece.

“The play is very political. My feeling, playing Sophocles, and having this heritage of 2500 years ago, is that we should give Greece a break. They gave us so much, with their thinkers, genius and poets.

“I think we have to save Greece no matter what, because what they gave us was immense. I think we have to take care of them.”

In the production, Binoche plays Antigone, a Theban noblewoman whose brother is deemed a traitor after fighting to the death in a vicious civil war. When his body is left unburied beyond the city walls, Antigone defies King Kreon to bury him.

“Antigone is a character who wants to bury her brother and the consequences of it are tragic, but she doesn’t want to die,” said Binoche. “She wants to live. Sophocles wrote that if bodies are not buried properly the soul wanders round in eternity. It needs the ritual. Antigone is really in tune with the principles of life, with the ontology of it.”

BASIC INSTINCT

The play concentrates on the battle of wills between Antigone and the King, who is her uncle, but the underlying theme is about the survival of society as a whole.

The King sticks fast to his belief that Antigone’s brother, Polyneikes, was a traitor because he fought against him in the civil war and, as a punishment and example to others, wants him left unburied beyond the city walls.

Antigone, who is already mourning the deaths of another brother and her mother as well as her dying father, believes she has a duty to make sure her brother is buried properly.

The play focuses on people’s basic instinct to find a final resting place for the dead; it is a ritual that helps mourners come to terms with their death and perhaps answers a subconscious desire to make sure they are in a “safe” place.

Van Hove has drawn parallels with the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine.

“The dead were left in an open field, rotting in the burning sun for over a week,” he said. “The whole world saw this as an act of barbarity.

“Once the bodies were recovered and brought to the Netherlands for identification, the Dutch government arranged a convoy of hearses in a 100km burial procession. This was a civilised and humane response, a mark of respect to the victims.”

Defying Kreon, Antigone performs the necessary burial rites but as she has disobeyed his rules, the King orders her imprisonment.

He is warned by a prophet to have compassion but refuses to back down and his inflexibility leads to his downfall.

It is a message about what can go wrong when a ruler or ruling class hold rigid to their beliefs about what is good for society without compassion for suffering – and a lesson for any government that refuses to see the damage their rules and regulations may be causing.