Antigone, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

We're all Thebans in Greg Hersov's audience-friendly production of Antigone. Urged to applaud the entry of Creon – a slightly glib, brown-suited politician surrounded by the military – the onlookers are swept into the action, almost ready to believe he is right to deny the traitor Polynices the ancient burial rites. But Matti Houghton's childlike Antigone has already impressed with her shining determination to honour her family whatever the consequences, so that we're not really swayed by the fawning chorus of elders – a motley bunch including a bandaged old man, schoolmarmish woman and smarmy chap in trainers.

The relationship between the two sisters, Antigone and Claire Cordier's black-clad Ismene, is interesting – Houghton so much the younger and idealistic, Cordier more sophisticated, worldly wise and unwilling to risk her life for family. The same kind of arguments of duty versus conscience emerge forcefully in the blazing row between Creon and his son, Antigone's fiancé, Haemon. As the boy, Ben Addis, appearing first like a rather pliable member of the Bullingdon Club, seems to grow in front of us as he ends up goading his father and destroying their relationship with his moral certainty and acute verbal thrusts.

Ian Redford makes a smugly arrogant Creon, whose reduction to anguished wreck is accomplished with minimum of effort as he and his family are destroyed by the gods.

Hersov's pared down interpretation, focusing on characters and themes, allows the audience to make up its own mind without resort to political propaganda or a more than passing contemporary allusion.

To 8 November (0161-833 9833)