Writer-director Alexander Zeldin made his name with the plays Beyond Caring, LOVE and Faith, Hope and Charity, a trilogy of agonisingly empathetic shows about Britain in the age of austerity.
I wonder if those same instincts ultimately shaped this overegged, psychosexual take on Sophocles’s Antigone, which might be coming from a place of compassion for the vulnerable, but ends up feeling perilously close to one of those in-yer-face ‘90s shock plays.
For the first half of The Other Place’s brisk 80-minutes it cleaves closely to Antigone thematically, albeit smartly transposed into the present. In the original two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old rendering of the story, Antigone is a Theban princess who is sentenced to death after she buries her brother Polynices in defiance of Creon, her uncle and the king of Thebes. In The Other Place, Annie (Emma D’Arcy) has returned to the family home to defy her uncle Chris (Tobias Menzies) over his plan to scatter the ashes of her late father, stating that they have to remain in the home no matter what (NB: though D’Arcy identifies as non-binary, Annie uses she/her pronouns).
If Annie’s behaviour isn’t especially logical, well that’s the point. Antigone’s bloody minded, suicidal defiance has often been interpreted as a form of mental illness. D’Arcy’s Annie is explicitly unwell, a fragile drifter driven beyond sanity by her inability to get over her father’s death (plus, some… other things). There’s no brother here, but both source material and Zeldin’s new play are about a woman apparently pushed over the edge by the death of a loved one.
In Zeldin’s production it all unfurls with a shimmering, merciless elegance, the bulk of the action occurring deep into the night in the family home, which is now in the process of being Grand Designs-ed by Chris and his new wife Erica (Nina Sosanya). An evocative electronic score from Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis provides a chic mix of juddering shock and eerie ambience. It’s all very intense, but there are some smartly bathetic gags, like when Annie’s sister Issy (Alison Oliver) gets overexcited about discovering a stash of Percy Pigs.
Buuut… towards the end, Zeldin starts to dramatically alter the fundamentals of the story, particularly – and this is one hell of an understatement – the relationship between Annie and Chris.
At its simplest level Antigone is a play about an unstoppable force hitting an immovable object, a tragedy about two people who refuse to back down to the point of out and out nihilism. That dynamic simply doesn’t exist in The Other Place, and while that’s of course Zeldin’s right, it feels like a form of hubris to fundamentally alter the meaning of Antigone and replace it with some, uh, ‘complicated’ stuff (I’m desperately avoiding spoilers here) that really needs unpacking and therefore doesn’t feel desperately suited to the punchy starkness of Greek tragedy.
Again, I would imagine the guy who wrote Beyond Caring is not doing this simply to stir the pot. But it comes across as lurid, and doesn’t gel especially well with what came before. Greek tragedies are bombastic and shocking but they’re clear, stark, clean, the characters destroyed for cruel but very explicable reasons. In The Other Place, it all gets very messy and it’s hard to exactly work out why Annie and Chris behave how they behave and to what extent either or both had any agency.
It’s a muddled showing from Zeldin the writer. But the elegant, ominous production from Zeldin the director ultimately salvages things, as do extremely committed performances from D’Arcy and Menzies. Their belief in this play very nearly carried me.
