PILOT Theatre artistic director Marcus Romer is collaborating with London playwright Roy Williams for the third time, joining together for a new touring version of Sophocles’s Antigone that brings the brutal world of Thebes kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

“The measure of trust in the relationship is that he’s happy working with a northern oiky company from York,” says Marcus, whose previous Pilot projects with Roy were Sing Yer (Heart Out For The Lads and The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. “I take real pride that an artist of his stature wants to work with us.”

Roy had always wanted to do a version of Antigone, and now that he and Pilot have created a play that is running at York Theatre Royal this week, Marcus has noted how the production resonates with a certain American television series.

“We’ve realised that Antigone is Season Two of The Wire: it’s season two of the Phoeban wars for the Netflix generation,” he says.

“What we’ve done is to show the difficult stuff that they couldn’t stage in Sophocles’s time, like the death scenes. They didn’t have the theatrical capabilities to do what we can do now, so the way the plays were written was an expedient reaction to the circumstances that they worked in.

“Now we’re used to doing things on a grand scale like the 62 episodes of Breaking Bad, and epic drama is more in our parlance than it was ten years ago. Writers are writing works with a great arc like Shakespeare’s plays. Antigone is a great story that’s still going strong after 2,500 years and we can tell it for a modern audience.”