Writer and Director: Alexander Zeldin
On family occasions, especially funerals and memorials, everyone takes a view on how it should all be conducted and what rites are performed for the dead. Alexander Zeldin’s new play The Other Place, an adaptation inspired by Antigone, wonders who owns death and who gets to decide when two very different attitudes to mourning and commemoration clash. Playing at the National Theatre, Zeldin’s very short production, which he writes and directs, creates its scenario well, borrowing liberally from Sophocles, but fails to build sufficient character substance to underpin its melodramatic and unsatisfying conclusion.
Waiting to scatter the ashes of his dead brother, Chris and Erica nervously prepare for the arrival of their long-absent niece, Annie. Having cared for his other adult children, Issy and Leni, Chris is sure his approach is the right one. But the intensity of Annie’s sudden presence throws the plans into disarray, feeling a connection to her dead father that destabilise the lives everyone has built since.
The early part of The Other Place is a well-considered study of different forms of grief, questioning how long to hold onto a loss. Zeldin contrasts Chris’ earnest and repeated desire to move on with Annie’s submersion in sorrow, and Rosanna Vize creates an unfinished kitchen set that perfectly represents this uncertain midpoint between the past and present experienced by the characters unable to act decisively. That Chris and Erica live in and have started to renovate the dead man’s house only adds to the symbolic weight that afflicts this reunion and the ways in which death comes to define the living.
The problem Zeldin encounters is that this knowledge is never shared with the audience, and we learn nothing about the qualities, personality or impact of the dead man or about the rest of the family to justify their increasingly extreme reactions. Characters exist; they interact with each other, but they feel untethered from the world the writer-director has created and not in the way he intends. After two quite strong scenes establishing the various connections and the stakes for Chris and Annie, if no one else, the longer final scene is overstuffed with soapy plot developments and odd digressions in a play with only an 80-minute running time.
A creepy attempt at seduction by Chris’s friend Terry (until this point a clown) has no basis in anything Zeldin has shown us till now, there only to give Annie’s sister Issy a moment, but it adds nothing to the plot, nor does it tell the viewer anything about the older generation of men represented in the play. A similar segment between Annie and Issy follows that treads water, revealing very little as everyone waits for Chris to come home for the big and rather peculiar showdown, which again introduces story points that have not been properly trailed.
There are strong performances here, Tobias Menzies, in particular, is grasping at a much deeper motivation for Chris than is written, more troubled than he wishes to admit, believing that he can brush it all away. Emma D’Arcy, too, is on the cusp of something much more interesting as our Antigone figure, Annie, has a history of psychiatric disturbance and a depth of grief that the script just doesn’t give sufficient space to. It also wastes Nina Sosanya as Erica, just a wife character with no agency of her own.
Zeldin has the basis of a really interesting family drama and the tensions that emerge from the loss of a family member, but The Other Place feels slight and needs more time to establish the characters and make their desire to be free of their grief more tangible.
Runs until 9 November 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Untethered grief
