Last Updated on October 9, 2024
Stellar cast grapples with intense but bizarre interpretation of Antigone, The Other Place:
Another day, another gritty modern take on a classical play at the National Theatre. With a device that has become a staple of modern productions, writer and director Alexander Zeldin has adapted Sophocles’s Antigone to fit within the confines of the family home. With a brand-new name and a star-studded cast, The Other Place certainly has makings of success, but this new production strays too far from the original. Unable to be one thing or the other, the play relies on its cast to pull it out of total absurdity.
The Other Place begins about five minutes before Annie, played by Emma D’Arcy is set to return to the family home for the first time in years. The house has been occupied by her uncle, Chris, portrayed by the formidable Tobias Menzies, since her father committed suicide. Annie wants her father’s ashes to remain within the family home, but Chris is set on being free of his brother’s death and wishes to scatter them instead. Chris and Annie can’t stand to be around each other, but as the story unfolds, a twisted tale of grief turns Chris’s family inside out.
Emma D’Arcy makes for a captivating Annie. Full of conviction, Annie is unrelenting in her campaign for her father’s wishes, a compulsion that D’Arcy shows to be underpinned by fraught grief, but also love. Alison Oliver plays Annie’s sister Issy, the far more amenable sibling who has elected to live with Chris, his wife Erica, played by Nina Sosanya, and her son Leni, played by Lee Braithwaite.
The set, designed by Rosanna Vize, resembles a gutted family home filled with half-painted walls and mismatched furniture, owing to Erica’s homemaking project. It’s an apt background for the anxiety-inducing conversations that mirror the trappings of middle-class London life. The familial tensions are escalated over conversations about duck sanctuaries, upcycling jumpers, and Percy-pigs with the focal point of this conflict being the huge sliding doors that frame the domestic ruin.
The trouble with this, however, is that the ruin comes with no exploration, other than ruin itself. If the gasps of horror on opening night were anything to go by, this production is certainly tense and shocking, but to what end? The impulse to make this story more brutal, more complex, and more incestuous, however, feels misguided. Under this light, Annie’s death is not an act of defiance, but an act of madness, a far clumsier ending than the beginning would have you presume.
Menzies does a terrific job of making Annie’s turn to madness appear more believable. Showing Chris’s rage to be the product of denial and grief, Menzies’s depiction is forceful but deft. The final minutes of the production are like watching a slow-motion implosion of his life, the final dive into madness confirmed by Annie’s death.
For many, the power of Sophocles’s Antigone lies in the heroine’s disobedience of King Creon, who had left her brother’s body to rot on the battlefield. Antigone demands her brother receive a decent burial, but Creon condemns her to death, a decision that ultimately destroys his own family. In this production, there is no such retribution, and Annie’s actions speak less to justice than they do to insanity. As a study of grief, this production is an interesting piece. But this is not Antigone as we know her, this is something else entirely.
The Other Place
Run time: 1hr 20mins
Runs Until: 9th November 2024
Lyttelton Theatre
The National Theatre
Upper Ground,
London,
SE1 9PX
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