Editorial disclosure: I am the director and co-adaptation playwright of the McGill Classics Play’s Antigone, writing in response to the Daily’s recent commentary piece.
The enduring relevance of Sophocles’ Antigone lies in its lessons about tyranny’s deceptive capacity for self- reinvention, as well as the dangers of abandoning nuance in favour of easy political equivalences. And yet, the Daily’s recent op-ed on McGill Classics’ recent adaptation of Antigone asserts: “The takeaway of this production seems to be that Trump = Creon = Hitler.”
This is a striking claim — not only because it is provocative, or because the analysis seems distastefully hamfisted — but because it is largely unaccompanied by substantiating evidence. The op- ed broadly fails to root its claims in specific textual or staging analysis, making it somewhat challenging to see what underlies the author’s certainty that their own interpretation of the show is synonymous with authorial intent. You are, of course, free to express your artistic critiques of the adaptation in whatever terms you please — political theatre invites as much. Granted, there is a meaningful difference between sharing one’s subjective interpretation, and asserting that viewpoint as objective fact. The op-ed repeatedly collapses that distinction — most notably in its assertion that the delivery of Kreon’s speeches is “clearly meant to recall the aesthetics of Hitler’s speeches.”
On this matter, I would like to be particularly direct: you may speak for yourself and your interpretation of the work in whatever terms you please. But absent any definitive sourcing to support your assertions, do not claim to credibly speak for me — and certainly do not presume authority over my beliefs regarding the Nazis my Jewish ancestors fled. As a matter of mutual respect, it is reasonable to expect a higher journalistic standard.
It is precisely this substitution of assumption for analysis that shapes the article’s broader critique. The op-ed proceeds from the premise that the adaptation functions as a direct allegory for Donald Trump, refracted through the visual shorthand of Nazi Germany. It confidently posits that Kreon functions as a thinly veiled composite of Trump and Hitler, while instructing the audience to recognize contemporary America as a simple reiteration of the Third Reich. The author then labels this analogy as deeply reductive, which I would agree with.
The production is indeed occurring during Trump’s presidency, and the adaptation is set in the 1930s. But it is an enormous leap to, on a near temporal basis alone, assert that the entire production exists to argue a simple equivalency between Trump and Hitler — or, otherwise, to construct Kreon’s character in their direct image. The piece does not demonstrate that this equation is textually sustained; it simply assumes it, and then proceeds to critique the show for failing to serve as a sufficiently rigorous allegory for that comparison.
For one thing: Hitler was far from the only ascendant fascist in the 1930s, and to imply otherwise is naively ahistorical. To move from “interwar aesthetic” to “Hitler” to “Trump = Hitler” is precisely the kind of interpretive shortcut the op-ed claims to resist, in part because it flatly ignores the existence of other autocrats in favour of modern history’s most-cited tyrant.
For instance: in arguing the Trumpism comparison, the article states that “Creon wants to make Thebes great again. He … seeks to vanquish the enemy within. In the second act … a soldier cries “I didn’t vote for him!”” Otherwise put, the core examples that led the author to understand Kreon as a Trump metaphor are (1) his expressed desire for national greatness, (2) rhetorical references to “the enemy within,” (3) thematic allusions to civic responsibility/ accountability among voters. It seems bizarre to treat these traits as uniquely Trumpian, when they all reflect core features of authoritarian movements. Each appears across decades and continents, and was included precisely for its recurrent applicability. These examples are not the markings of a single presidency, but the grammar of authoritarianism.
In failing to see beyond its narrow allegorical framework, the op-ed (once again) mistakes its own interpretive lens for the text’s thesis. It also misses the fact that the production’s timelessness is not an accident of staging — it is rather the point.
The production draws deliberately from multiple historical reference points — not as a collage of aesthetic gestures, but as a structured study of recurring authoritarian mechanisms. Mussolini’s rhetoric of purification and national restoration informs Kreon’s language of order and rebirth. Mosley’s domestic fascist movement (with its normalization of organized intimidation) informs Kreon’s reliance on coercive enforcement. Saddam Hussein’s security-state logic shapes the regime’s mediated relationship to its citizens, while Stephen Miller’s bureaucratic nationalism echoes in the language of contamination and de-personification Kreon uses to justify violence. This structural layering of references is not arbitrary, but a deliberate integration of contemporary history’s fascist lineage — intended to illustrate how tyranny evolves across contexts while its underlying methods continue to rhyme.
The op-ed argues that this “aimless” historical referencing strips the play of its complexity — but it fails to locate complexity because it makes no attempt to search for it. Instead, it narrows the frame to two culturally familiar reference individuals and reads everything into that binary. Regrettably, the text of the article then finds itself too preoccupied with dismantling its own straw man (ie. whether “Trump = Creon = Hitler”) and leaves little time to engage with the actual subject matter or text of the show. Thus, by insisting that this production’s meaning collapses into a Trump-Hitler equation, it reduces tyranny to a visual or rhetorical checklist and reinforces the very flattening it critiques. This is a dangerous reflex.
If fascism only “counts” when it resembles Hitler, we will keep failing to recognize it in time. Reducing authoritarianism to surface resemblance — podium equals Hitler, nationalist rhetoric equals Trump — shifts attention away from structure. It distracts from how power consolidates itself, how law becomes weaponized, how cruelty is normalized, how dissent is reframed as treachery, how fear becomes governance. That black- and-white mode of thinking feels decisive, but is a lie.
When our political imagination narrows to two familiar templates, we become less capable of identifying authoritarianism when it emerges through different institutions, different languages, or different faces.
Antigone endures not because it allegorizes one regime, but because it interrogates the moral architecture of power itself and the recurrent tools that fascists have used to accumulate power and exercise cruelty throughout human history. The point is not to individualize the tyrant; it is to recognize their methods — and to learn from the past before we are forced to relive it once again.