Emma d’Arcy and Phia Saban have just finished playing opposite each other as warring sisters in HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon. In London, they find themselves each playing the same classical heroine—in two different adaptations of plays by Sophocles.
Both play Antigone, the obdurate daughter of King Oedipus—he of Freud’s famous complex. We know Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, but in both these adaptations Antigone’s equally totalising obsession with her father takes centre stage.
If you’re a regular reader of arts coverage, you’ll have heard more about the latter of these productions, Robert Icke’s West End adaptation of Oedipus with Mark Strong in the title role and Leslie Manville as Jocasta. The more interesting production, however, is The Other Place, an adaptation of Antigone by the Anglo-French director Alexander Zeldin, in which d’Arcy stars as a gen Z Antigone reviving old troubles in an affluent London family.
Both productions wrestle with the fundamental problem of adapting Greek tragedy for the 21st century. Modern audiences have learned to see these as everyman stories, but their originals are kings, prophets and the offspring of gods. The family schisms of mythic figures should have consequences for entire cities: without that, Greek drama is neutered.
Yet for my money, the success of The Other Place comes from rejecting such grandeur. Zeldin’s play is an entirely domestic drama; which is not to say that—with its questions as to whether the home can be a safe space—it is not political. First and foremost, however, it is concerned with grief.
The success of The Other Place comes from rejecting the usual grandeur of Greek drama
Icke’s Oedipus tries desperately to bring the political into every domestic moment. This Oedipus is a Macron-esque figure whose slick new movement is on the brink of victory, boosted by his passionate marriage to the widow of the nation’s last long-term leader. He foolishly chooses election night to promise a transparent investigation into his predecessor’s death. As a plot structure, it maps perfectly on to the original. In terms of raw drama, it’s a bit too polished, like this Oedipus himself.
Icke’s production is still impressive, cogent, moving. Manville, approaching goddess status among critics, is as emotive as ever underneath a brittle, aristocratic veneer. Strong is utterly believable as a smooth political narcissist, high on his own PR and offloading dirty work to his despised brother-in-law, Creon. As Antigone and Creon, the characters who will carry the next instalment of this story, Saban and Michael Gould share a moment of intimacy that points across the river to Zeldin’s dark twist on Sophocles’s original.
But after 30 years of living with the Greek myths, I’m not sure any of it made me think of this story in a new way.
Meanwhile, The Other Place begins with the most conventional of family disputes: a squabble over whether to keep a dead man’s ashes in the home or scatter them outside. Boundaries matter here: between the indoors and the outdoors; the home and the city; between kin. There is a twist, two thirds in, but even this reflects Zeldin’s exhaustive reading of the Antigone tradition. No spoilers here, but those who’ve read Racine’s version of the story, La Thébaïde, will be less surprised than others. Some may feel it takes this story away from the world of ordinary families and makes it less relatable.
That’s not the only element that reflects Zeldin’s French influences. With its interest in the neuroses and domestic unravelling of the haute bourgeoisie, this could be a play by Yasmina Reza or Florian Zeller. It is helped by d’Arcy’s contained power, flickering between inscrutable calm and repressed fury with just a twitch of an eyelid.
Tobias Menzies is a Creon who pulls at our empathy even at his worst; Nina Sosanya is convincing as his wife, desperately trying to impose structure on her life in the form of a new kitchen extension (Rosanna Vize’s Hampstead-esque set). Alison Oliver is a steely pragmatist as Antigone’s sister, a role oddly cut from Icke’s story.
Unlike Icke’s take on Sophocles, The Other Place makes no claims to show us a polity hanging on these people’s flaws. But step by step, the dynamics of power and its abuse within the family are laid bare. Both plays impress, but The Other Place will haunt you.
