Emma D'Arcy, Alison Oliver, Nina Sosanya, Tobias Menzies. Photo Credit: Sarah Lee
Simon Jenner, October 30th 2024
If you know his work, you might expect Alexander Zeldin’s The Other Place to teem with patient unfolding detail. His fifth play at the National though zips past with overlapping terse dialogue in 80 headlong minutes; even with those still moments so characteristic of Zeldin. The clue ‘after Antigone’ suggests Zeldin wishes to compress even the velocity of Greek tragedy through a Venturi tube. Directed by him it runs at the Lyttelton till November 9th.
Antigone itself seethes through The Other Place with themes and images that pop up out of well, the other place, with the ripple of subterranean myth. Zeldin’s characters keep the root of their Greek names. But it’s also a wry look at buried family dynamics given a kick from the past; in a real sense from not dealing with death and its consequences. Torsions and unfinished feeling simmer beyond the brittle cheer of the opening, with jokes about Foxtons.
Alison Oliver, Emma D’Arcy Photo Credit: Sarah Lee
There’s a partly unwelcome return, after everyone else has been introduced. Annie (Emma D’Arcy), with a fragile mental health history has only turned up for a scattering. She, and sister Issy (Alison Oliver), still mourn a father who killed himself years before. There’s clearly a close link between him and Annie, with h her kinship to Antigone’s trauma and implacability. Quite why the father’s ashes still lie in the house and why his brother, Chris (Tobias Menzies), has taken it over, is mysterious.
Rosanna Vize’s set is a detailed open-plan kitchen twisted to ominous shadow in James Farncombe’s lighting: Annie’s pitched tent outside the glass-panelled windows burns blue like a magic lantern and reminds you of something. A pulsing electronic score from Foals’ Yannis Philippakis grunges out portent.
Issy’s returned as she can’t afford London rent. But while she’s been happy to take money from uncle Chris who’s ”loaded” Annie naturally has held aloof. Although Leni (a larky, sympathetic Lee Braithwaite), child of Chris’s wife Erica from a previous relationship, interjects with sharp home truths, they’re not destined as tragic suitor, more concerned friend.
Whilst Erica (a contained, watchful Nina Sosanya) keeps the frangible peace as best she can, Chris’s friend Terry (Jerry Killlick) of the Foxton joke (“It sometimes disturbs me the thoughts I have about them”) is a comedic interloper. Wheeling like a faded rock-star-turned-developer Killlick brings edgy chill, Terry toxic with late capitalism and masculinity gradually peeled back. He pronounces doom like a dodgy Tiresias-cum-chorus.
Emma D'Arcy, Tobias Menzies Photo Credit: Sarah Lee
He’s not the only toxic male though. Menzies soon reveals Chris’s tough affability is gridded; with implacable red lines. Zeldin though explores just what these are. With this and earlier a slightly less shocking scene with others, a series of gasps erupts from the audience. Sophocles can still shock.
Zeldin’s way of repurposing the original, invoking its previous family traumas with a twist, has concertina’d into a few hours. And one summer invoked in the flick of a tea-towel unlocks the secrets of perhaps three people, and tells us what’s been pitched. It’s high-risk telegraphing all that in a gesture meant to explain much that’s gone before. So powerful too that a buried aftermath it invokes gets lost in present drama.
Nevertheless it’s Issy, normally conformist peacemaker in Antigone, who burns too at Annie’s explicit hierarchy of grief, something Annie’s never acknowledged. Tellingly Issy uses the present tense: “He’s my dad too, he’s my daddy and I want to live my life” Issy shouts her bitter affirmation like a rebuke. Her final lines deliver the real tragedy between them. In Oliver’s mix of sassy and appalled, Issy rises to a knowledge every bit as keen as Annie’s.
D’Arcy though commands by a sidelong scrutiny. Annie’s judgemental, uncompromising but also teetering: you can feel D’Arcy slowly winding into Annie’s own cindered urn of possibility. She hugs her own ruin, but the end still turns on the final toss of words, an exchange, an encounter.
Zeldin’s The Confessions was an outstanding shift to a chronicle of his mother’s life. This is its dramatic opposite. Scrupulous in marking the dynamics of grief, denial and coping, Zeldin has wrought something more precious than a version. A must-see.
Emma D’Arcy, Tobias Menzies, Lee Brathwaite. Photo Credit Sarah Lee
Directed by Alexander Zeldin, Set and Costume Designer Rosanna Vize, Lighting Designer James Farncombe, Composer Yannis Philippakis ,Sound Designer Josh Anio Grigg, Movement Director Marcin Rudy
Casting Alistair Coomer CDG ad Chloe Blake, Intimacy Co-ordinator Elle McAlpine for EK Intimacy, Fight Director Sam Lyon-Behan,
Voice Coach Cathleen McCarron, Dialect Coach Charmian Hoare, Dramaturg Sasha Milavic Davies, Associate Director Sammy J Glover, Associate Lighting Designer Bethany Gupwell
Producer Debbie Farquhar, Production Manager Hannah Blamire, CSM Pippa Meyer, DSM Julia Slienger ASMs Hannah Gillett and Tash Savidge