This classical Greek tragedy concerns the collision between two forms of law: legal and moral, human and divine. Antigone's brother, Polyneices, has died in a rebellious attack on his homeland, Thebes. Seeking to make an example of Polyneices, Antigone's uncle Creon, King of Thebes, forbids anyone to bury or honor the body. As the corpse lies rotting in the field, however, Antigone decides to respectfully dispose of her brother's body, thus setting herself up as a proponent of "the law of the gods," against her uncle -- a representative of "the law of men." Through a series of debates and discussions, the play explores the complexity of moral judgment and the dangers of self-righteousness and blind dogmatism.

For a play promoting healthy skepticism and humble circumspection, though, The Burial at Thebes comes across as strangely doctrinaire, to the point of hypocrisy. This is not a contradiction inherent in Sophocles's tragedy, but one created by Heaney and emphasized by director Lucy Pitman-Wallace. In this version of Antigone, Creon is a glad-handing politician with a bitterly misogynistic outlook and the emotional maturity of a 3-year-old. Antigone, by contrast, is a pure, proto-feminist ingénue with all the stoical determination of a martyred saint. These black-and-white characterizations blur the finer nuances of the play, reducing it too quickly to a lament over the repression of the Obvious Heroine by Oblivious Tyrant.

This reductive outlook is exacerbated by a misguided attempt to be "shockingly up-to-date." With outsized emphasis on such phrases as "patriotic duty" and on accusations of being "anti-Theban," The Burial at Thebes blatantly (almost embarrassingly) injects the rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror into this ancient Greek tale. I almost expected a messenger to arrive in the climactic moment of the tragedy to inform Creon that his approval rating had dipped to 29 percent; that's how blatant the wink and the nudge were. Unfortunately, this brings the worst of contemporary polarization and polemic to Sophocles's ancient tale. There has to be a middle ground between the cautiously apolitical interpretations that Sophocles typically receives and the propagandistic tinge given to this Antigone.

Beyond this basic misstep, the translation is solid and engaging. Heaney manages to find a compact, colloquial tone for the play's many debate-scenes. Particularly fresh is his version of the scene where Haeman delicately attempts to criticize his headstrong father, Creon. In this scene, Heaney's talent for deft psychological portraits is undeniable. However, amid all this prosaic dialogue, Heaney allows far too little of his famously rough-edged poetry to emerge.

One unqualified success, in both poetic and dramatic terms, is the role of Tiresias, performed with just the right mixture of mythological grandness and cranky exasperation by Richard Evans. Tiresias's long monologue detailing the spread of pestilence (literal and figurative) from the rotting corpse of Antigone's brother, Polyneices, showcases Heaney's signature blend of soaring lyricism and earthy detail to great effect.

If only the translation and production had practiced the anti-dogmatism it preaches, this could have been a great and though-provoking version of a familiar classic.