How do you breathe new life into an ancient Greek tragedy? If anyone can, then it’s Juliette Binoche and Ivo van Hove. The actor and the director talk to Charlotte Higgins about the personal tragedies that fed into their productionPatrick O’Kane, the actor who is playing the seer Tiresias in Ivo van Hove’s production of Sophocles’s Antigone, is waiting for the working day to begin in a London rehearsal room, watching Andy Murray on his phone in the Australian Open. How do you find Van Hove, I ask. “Impish,” he returns. Indeed, across the room Van Hove and Juliette Binoche lark about, two slender slips of people erupting in laughter. Van Hove is trim and be-cardiganed, Binoche is in jeans and high-heel boots and a sweatshirt that looks incredibly casual but is in fact by Isabel Marant, reminding me that not 48 hours ago she was in the front row at the Armani show at the Palais de Tokyo and is an Oscar-winning star (in 1996 for The English Patient) with a film career spanning from the Three Colours trilogy of the early 1990s through work with Haneke, Cronenberg and Kiarostami.Two and a half years ago, Binoche and Van Hove met at a restaurant at the Gare de Lyon to discuss working together. Van Hove is hugely admired for his ability to excavate psychology and bring plays to the stage with a fresh, breakneck force. A regular visitor to the Barbican with his company Toneelgroep Amsterdam with such productions as The Roman Tragedies in 2009, he cemented his British reputation with last year’s production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge at the Young Vic in London, which is now playing in the West End (as well as in cinemas on 26 March). One director described Van Hove’s work to me this way: “Often in British theatre, the director and actors have decided that John Proctor is a good man, Abigail Williams is a bad woman [to take the example of Miller’s The Crucible]. But when you watch a Van Hove production, it is clear that Eddie Carbone [in a View from the Bridge] knows he is right. The Sicilians know they are right. There isn’t this sense of the play having been agreed on.” Binoche, for her part, was keen to return to the theatre after Mademoiselle Julie, a version of the Strindberg play that she brought to the Barbican in 2012. Related: A View from the Bridge five-star review – Ivo van Hove reinvents Arthur Miller Related: 'My aim is the ultimate production': Ivo van Hove on directing Arthur Miller Continue reading...
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