SINGAPORE — What ensures a piece of art’s universality is, in fact, its ability to, time and again, resonate in the here and now. It is what makes Sophocles’ Antigone a powerful work: Its themes of loyalty to family, to state, to higher beings, and the constant clash to uphold (or undermine) these values, are timeless precisely because they are timely.

Here is Antigone defying the law to bury a brother who has defied the law or disowning her sister for obeying it. Here is a king, Creon, who rules over a fearful people with an iron fist, willing to send his niece/great niece/soon-to-be-daughter-in-law to her doom for defying the state — but agonises over repercussions of Greek gods. It may have been set ages ago, but it’s not hard to recognise, in the power play or debate over a higher good (whatever that may be) that occurs in the play, something of what’s happening in Singapore, for example.

That’s all well and good. But director Li Liuyi seems to have forgotten that the classic Greek tragedy is also, well, a tragedy. He describes this staging as an example of “pure drama”. And, in a previous interview, talks of “theatrical clues” that allow audiences to immerse in the experience.

And so we a most stripped-down Antigone — an all-white ensemble in an all-white setting, with movement and sound kept minimal. It is by no means “experimental”, though. Despite the occasional chanting, whispering, shouting and finger-snapping by the chorus, and all the collapsing and lying down going on in what’s a pretty horizontal production, it also feels slightly old school talkie.

But it is old school talkie in a manner that suggests almost scholarly distance and objectivity rather than a living experience, as if privileging discourse over heart.

One glimpses humanity in Lu Fang’s defiant, strong-willed portrayal of Antigone and when Li Shilong enters as the blind seer Teiresias, a brief but memorable presence that gave the proceedings a lift.

But for the most part, the play rambled on like a cold one-sided discussion by the play with itself, not helped by the one-note portrayal of its other main character, Creon. His chauvinism, his bluster, his eventual panic all encapsulated in Lin Xiyue’s interpretation that never seems to go beyond the look of being stunned — at moments when he actually deigns to look at the audience.

Indeed, this Antigone seems to have forgotten one important point — that a play’s universality isn’t a given but is something that has to be negotiated with its audience time and again. And for that to happen, it has to look them in the eye first.