Review: THE OTHER PLACE, National Theatre

It is tempting to believe that the human condition is evolving, continually adapting to its environment aided by medicine, technology and a growing understanding of who we are and why we do what we do, individually and collectively. Then a play like Alexander Zeldin’s The Other Place comes along like someone opening french doors on a bitter winter’s day and such complacency is blown away with a terrifying warning that what we once did, we can do again, because we’re the same now as we were then.

He appends his play’s title with the phrase ‘after Antigone’ which does prompt a quick scan of Sophocles’ Wikipedia entry on the way to the South Bank, but it’s not really necessary. What might be required is an appreciation of Greek Tragedy’s enhanced emotions, its prompting of extreme responses, its unflinching depiction of devastating consequences. “Like every depressing Eastenders’ storyline rolled into one”, was my brother’s summation of his background prep - there's your trigger warning!

It doesn’t start like that. For 20 minutes or so (in a work that wastes none, the tightness of its pacing critical to its inexorable build of tension) matters are domestic. Erica is a house-proud wife and mother, over-invested in a renovation with its bespoke kitchen island and all; Leni is a detached teen, ready with a cynical remark or raised eyebrow; and Issy is a little older, off to one side in more senses than one, anxious about the ping, ping, ping of alerts on her phone. We laugh at this oh-so-familiar domestic scene, more sitcom than soap opera, but the temperature soon drops.

The first cold breeze comes with the arrival of Chris, too quiet, too still, too keen to project self-possession to actually be self-possessed. Husband, father and uncle to three we know, he is not feared, but there’s something that sets him apart, a physical presence but a psychological bystander. Terry barges in, a bluff handyman with more than a touch of The Rocky Horror Show’s Riff Raff in his cynicism, menace and insider-knowledge of his employer about him.

The Siberian blast arrives with Annie, Issy’s elder sister, not one to compromise easily and who has history in the house and with the household. A battle of wills erupts between Chris and Annie over the fate of their brother’s/father’s ashes and two dread feelings grow - that there’s more in this antagonism than meets the eye and that this won’t end well.

Seldom do all the elements that power theatre’s unique capacity to crash over the fourth wall like a tsunami, come together as effectively as they do in this electrifying, unforgettable 80 minutes of squirming mental discomfort. Rosanna Vize’s set has something of the clean modernism of the one used in Rachel Cusk’s Medea at the Almeida nine years ago, a kindred spirit to this production. It draws us into a familiar space about to transform into a battleground. It also presents an ever-visible, ever-threatening external space of a dark forest, heaving with secrets, one to which Annie retreats despite Chris’s express instructions, the physical counterpart of their psychological states, all beautifully lit by James Farncombe. Yannis Philippakis’s music also nags like a stomach cramp, just making things worse.

Footnotes, of course, if the acting couldn’t extract every ounce of weight from its source material. Each member of the cast, who devised the work with Zeldin, supplemented his trademark naturalism with their own eerily everyday line readings, no chance to ‘off-centre’ the audience missed.

Tobias Menzies barely seems to act at all, a remarkable and rare gift for an actor. Often shrouded in an overcoat, he can stand still for minutes at a time while we see his frustration curdle to anger, his guilt bleed into self-pity, his arrogance fuel his entitlement. He really must play Vanya soon, but this is plenty enough for now!

Emma D’Arcy rises to the challenge of Annie with equal facility, the closed off ball of resentment who slouches in the kitchen-diner of the much-modified house becoming first stubborn, then principled, as the tug of war over the urn becomes a fight for the control of shared traumatic history. We get a drip feed of clues as to why, and D’Arcy never topples into caricature or melodrama, both of which are dangerously close-by throughout. 

Jerry Killick is funny and skin-crawlingly gruesome as Terry, Nina Sosanya heartbreaking as Erica, caught in a hurricane not of her making. Alison Oliver (Issy) and Lee Braithwaite (Leni) may not have many lines, but one aspect of Zeldin’s genius is his ability to create vivid characters who prove essential to the narrative from such meagre resources - here are another two.

The Other Place is a ferocious whirlpool of a play that sucks you further and further down into a vortex that drowns you in man’s venality. That all this was known to Sophocles some 2500 years or so ago and that it’s all so plausible in (say) a Richmond townhouse today, is both eye-poppingly revelatory, but also bracing in its exposure of what lies behind the mundanities of everyday life. 

Go see it, but take a walk along the Thames after you file out, as ashen-faced as your fellow audience members, decompression not just recommended, but essential.

The Other Place at The National Theatre until 9 November

Photo Credits: Sarah Lee

          

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