The Other Place @ National Theatre - Review
Shocking but shallow: how not to update a classic. ★★
At National Theatre (Lyttleton), Southbank, until 9th November 2024.
Tickets from £10.
Rating: ★★
I love a well updated story from the classical world. There’s so much potential to highlight the universality of human nature, to draw clever comparisons between two distant points in time and space, to indulge in surreality and the supernatural. This is, unfortunately, not one.
After Antigone, Alexander Zeldin tells the story of a reunion in a mundane home. Annie (Emma D’Arcy) is back in her father’s home, now the home of her uncle Chris (Tobias Menzies) and sister Issy (Alison Oliver), and Chris’s new family, Erica (Nina Sosanya) and Leni (Lee Braithwaite). It is tense, with impressive comic timing and effectively naturalistic dialogue, but tension and shock (more on that later) are no substitute for a compelling plot.
Zeldin makes one of the most frustrating blunders when adapting classics. In Antigone, there are motivations behind the characters’ behaviour. Creon left Polynices to be eaten by eagles because, in ancient Greek theology, burial was the way to the underworld and a peaceful death and to deny someone a burial ensured their spirit would aimlessly haunt. Chris has no such motivation in wanting to scatter his brother’s ashes, the best motivation we get is a desire to move on and forget the past. This is the core conflict, and without a strong justification it turns from tragic to frustrating. Leni is not some kind of Cassandra figure when he suggests a simple resolution, there’s no tragedy to his easy answer being ignored, it just makes the piece feel forced.
Annie is better motivated- strong superstitions, a family history of mental illness and rotting food in her backpack all point to OCD or a paranoid disorder. She is also played much better, Emma D’Arcy plays her excellently confused, impulsive and emotionally disregulated, heavily supporting this interpretation. But is this what we want? A classical heroin notable for doing what is right in defiance of male rule, now acting from a place of insanity rather than brave loyalty?
Issy is an interesting character, she mediates the tension between Annie and Chris, her naivity helps bury some of the leads while still hinting at the more sinister points in the backstory. She is also the most normal and modern character, an unemployed 20-something living with a relative rent free and trying to make a go of an upcycling business. Her contrast with Annie works well, but with Chris just highlights how little thought seems to have been put into his motivation.
While not all that key to the plot, I would be remiss in not mentioning Nina Sosanya’s Erica. She excellently acts a myopic stepmother, focused almost entirely on the house renovation despite the chaos unfolding and family collapsing around her. In the hands of a less skilled actress, this part could come off as one-note and a little sexist, but Sosanya’s nervous energy ties it in perfectly.
I promised I’d mention shock again: all the interesting scenes rely on it. It comes in two forms. One is lazy audiovisual, a sudden change in lighting and loud music, it makes you jump like a haunted house with none of the building terror.
The other is breaches of taboo- a spoiler is coming up, click away now if you’d like to go in blinder. Still here? There is a sexually tense undercurrent between Annie and Chris, her uncle. It peaks and is played back down again, until a grand reveal that they were sexually intimate before he sent her off to an unspecified school (so, we can infer she was 17 or younger). This is accompanyed by kissing and her spitting in his mouth, almost seeming to justify the child sexual abuse (referred to euphemistically as disturbing sexual content in NT’s warnings, which is disappointing). Breaches of taboo can be extremely interesting in theatre, but these are not. They’re briefly shocking, but actually take away from the interest- before the confirmation, Annie and Chris were tense and left us questioning, after it’s a resolved tale of abuse that never gets fully explored.
As always at NT, the staging (Rosanna Vize) is monumental. A familiar kitchen extension on a suburban house is reconstructed larger than life, with many charming small touches- half of the floor is still underlay, we see a plug socket peaking out from upstairs. Alongside technical skill, the central placement of the sliding window-doors, looming trees and huge, moving light source effectively draw our eyes to the forest.
The Other Place really feels like another edgy revival of a Greek myth, following the story without the tragic impact, while adding gratuitous incest and mental illness. It is somewhat redeemed by a fantastic cast and set, but still not something the world needed.
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