Sport for Jove's Antigone is a modern setting of Sophocles' tragedy

What do we do with the corpses of home-grown enemies of the state? Should they be buried in the soil of the country they have attacked, or have they forfeited that right?

Sophocles raised the issue in Antigone, first performed in Athens about 441BC, and people are still trying to solve the problem 2500 years later.

The play sets in conflict the rights of the state and those of the individual. The sons of Oedipus by his own mother have fought a civil war for the throne of Thebes. Their uncle Creon, the king, forbids the burial of the brother who fought against the state and sentences to death anyone who disobeys. Antigone believes her brother must be buried, and is willing to die for her convictions.

Sport for Jove Theatre Company's managing artistic director Damien Ryan has modernised the play, struck by the fact that current events seemed to retell Sophocles' play.

Turkey, for instance, wouldn't let the bodies of 13 Kurdish fighters killed in Syria cross the border, while the United States refused to bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston marathon bombers.

"Legally and judicially, the state of Massachusetts and a couple of neighbouring states would not put his body in American soil, purely for symbolic reasons. When they did bury him, people dug him up and left him on the earth again. It's the same story Sophocles told."

To emphasise its relevance, Ryan updated the story to the present. (Canberra audiences will remember his acclaimed production of Hamlet from last year, set in a Cold War police state.)

"It's a new work about what the events of the play would be if they happened in 2016, in the aftermath of a terrible conflict," he says.

The Greek city of Thebes becomes an anywhere space that reminds the audience of modern war zones, including Aleppo, Mosul and South Sudan.

"Even though we're maintaining the notion that it's a Greek story, and it's set in Greece," Ryan says, "it's an imagined Greece that is a melting pot of modern conflict."

He replaced the conflict between two brothers with a contest between ideologies: "The point is simply that a girl called Antigone has a brother who turned against the state."

In updating the play, Ryan believes he is true to the intent of Greek tragedy, which was a means of debating issues that affected the community.

"The purpose of tragedy is about enriching the human experience, not just entertaining us," Ryan says.

Theatre was so important to Athenian democracy that the state made it compulsory for all citizens to attend the performances at the Dionysia, the religious festival in honour of the god of wine and theatre.

The plays proceeded in a series of agons, like a dramatised debate. One character advanced an argument, and another character refuted it.

"They argue it out," Ryan explains.

"Sophocles wasn't interested in the events themselves, but in the moral arguments about those events, so we sit and we look at the democratic moral argument about why people behave the way they do."

By listening to the arguments in the play, the audience would be more informed citizens.

"We are learning a moral lesson which we should be able to carry with us when we leave the building," Ryan says.

"We have vicariously watched other people go through horrendous suffering because of their choices, so what choices might you make when faced with the same dilemma?"

In this case, both Antigone and Creon have some right on their side, but the conflict of principles ends up destroying them both.

"Lots of people can have well-meaning attitudes," Ryan says, "and somehow we have to find what is right."

At the same time, Greek tragedy moved the audience by pity and fear, in Aristotle's phrase, and purged them of those emotions, so that they left the theatre better and wiser people than when they entered.

This appeal to both the intellect and the emotions gives Greek tragedy its power, and Ryan believes the play will move the audience as well as making them think.

"I hope that if you build well-rounded enough human beings that ring true and the performance is rich and honest, an audience gets so entangled in this story that they feel themselves emotionally trapped in what's happening."

And they might just learn the lesson of Sophocles' powerful, politically charged play:

"If we take our hatred out on the dead, then all we're doing is bringing hatred into the world. We carry this hatred inside us, and all it does is pollute us. We actually just have to say 'OK, no one will be punished, everyone is pardoned, let's just try to start again, so the bloodshed will stop.' In essence, Sophocles may be saying that the only hope for humanity is to somehow bury the hatchet and not remember where we buried it."