Dr. Salomé Paul is a Teaching Fellow in the School of English, Drama, and Film at UCD and the GSA. Her research focuses on contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedies to challenge systems of oppression. She has published two monographs, one based on her PhD thesis jointly prepared at Sorbonne University and UCD (Avatars contemporains du tragique grec sur les scènes françaises et irlandaises) and another one based on her IRC postdoctoral research, entitled Marina Carr and Greek Tragedy: Feminist Myths of Monstrosity and released in 2024. She also co-edited with Clara Mallon the edited collection Working-Class Women in Irish Literature and Theatre: Emerging from Silence, which is going to be published in 2025. Her current research focuses on postcolonial versions, adaptations, and appropriations of Greek tragedies.

The Riot Act is a version of Sophocles’ Antigone written by Tom Paulin and produced by the Field Day Theatre Company in 1984 at the Guildhall in Derry. This version of a Greek tragedy reframes the tragic conflict opposing Antigone to Creon through the lens of the opposition between nationalism and unionism to question and challenge British imperialism in the north of Ireland. Yet, this intention underlines a drastic transformation of Greek tragedy’s initial and historical purpose.

During the 5th century BCE, tragedy was a democratic institution in Athens. In this regard, it offered a dramatic justification and endorsement of Athenian imperialism over the Hellenistic world. Such a purpose has been central to the modern appropriation of classical tragedy by modern colonising countries to assert their supremacy over colonised peoples through culture. In this broad colonial context, Ireland, however, stands aside as classical culture has not been imported by British imperialism but is indigenous to the island. As such, not only have the classics been used to support a nationalist agenda in Ireland but also to assert the supremacy of Irish culture, as conceived by W.

B. Yeats, who offered versions of the first two plays of Sophocles’ Theban Cycle: Oedipus the King (1926) and Oedipus at Colonus (1927), both produced at the Abbey Theatre. Paulin’s The Riot Act, however, departs from that tradition. His version borrows elements from Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (1944), an adaptation conceived and produced during the Nazi occupation of France, and Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s The Island (1973), a South African appropriation conceived and produced during the Apartheid era. In doing so, Paulin restructures tragedy and turns this ancient genre into a postcolonial art calling for the end of British imperialism in the north of Ireland.