By Ron Fassler . . .
After the recent Broadway run of writer-director Robert Icke’s reworking of Sophocles’ Oedipus, which starred British theatre royalty Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, here come the Brits again with another modern take on a Greek tragedy. With its roots in Sophocles’ Antigone, writer-director Alexander Zeldin’s The Other Place, now playing for a limited engagement at The Shed’s Griffin Theatre in Hudson Yards, is a vibrant tale of terror and woe. After a well-received 2024 run in London, presented at the National Theatre, this first-class production has had the smarts to bring its two leads across the pond. Tobias Menzies (Emmy Award winner as Prince Philip in Netflix’s The Crown) and Emma D’Arcy (Princess Rhaenyra in HBO’s House of Dragons) play their roles with unflinching conviction. So much so, that when the two are alone onstage, the riveting tension between them is almost too much to bear.
A web of family secrets lurks in the shadows of Rosanna Vize’s set design (she also provides the costumes), that features a home under construction. A white light box hovers overhead that shifts and turns to… well, shed light on things (overall, James Farncombe’s lighting design shows a deft touch). The story of Oedipus is one of incest and expulsion, so it’s not that much of a spoiler to say that Menzie’s Uncle Chris and D’Arcy’s Annie—his wayward niece—are not right from the start. Having moved into his brother’s home a few years earlier after his suicide on the premises, Chris also became responsible for both Annie and her younger sister, Issy (Ruby Stokes). The family home built by his grandfather is now Chris’s, where he’s living with his new wife, Erica (Lorna Brown) and her teenage son, Leni (Lee Braithwaite). It is the decision to finally spread his brother’s ashes that leads to the estranged Annie coming back to the house that was once hers which has now been taken over by her uncle and his girlfriend. Unhappy with the massive renovations going on, even though she’s been away for some time, Annie returns as one unhappy camper.
Directed at an unrushed pace by Zeldin, the 80-minutes fly by keeping the audience on the edge of their seats. At the Wednesday matinee I attended, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop, testament to how well this tricky stuff works. The Greeks, credited with inventing tragedies as a theatrical form, are not to be messed with lightly. That said, even if you are unaware of its Greek origins, there’s nothing in The Other Place to tip you off, which is a credit to its subtlety. Dipping toes in these waters raises the level of drowning. And, as music was an important part of these plays back in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, Zeldin turned to a frequent collaborator, composer Yannis Phillippakis, who has created a throbbing, electronic score that aids immeasurably to the mood permeating the play.
Perhaps my favorite moment comes courtesy of a hat tip to Anton Chekhov. When Annie finally arrives after a large build-up of exposition in the play’s first ten-fifteen minutes, her sister rushes to greet her outside. This leaves the people inside to stand around and wait for their return entrance. Standing there, their faces expressing insecurities and a sense of palpable danger, they listen to the sounds of the sisters joyously embracing one another. Everything is happening while nothing is happening. Like I said, Chekhov.
All the performances are first rate, though as mentioned earlier, Menzies and D’Arcy are in a class by themselves. Menzies possesses one of those rumbling stage voices that make going to the theatre worthwhile. D’Arcy projects a mass of tensions and contradictions, believable in every breathing moment. Ruby Stokes is excellent as Issy, a complex role, and I also enjoyed Lee Braithwaite as the teenage Leni, in addition to Lorna Brown, who plays his mother, Erica. There’s one outsider in the play, Terry (Jerry Killick), who is saddled with a part that feels a bit wedged in and not organic to the proceedings. We are meant to look at him as fulfilling the function of Tiresias, the blind prophet from Antigone, but this is the one aspect of the play that isn’t entirely successful, though Killick does a fine job with the task at hand. Maybe leaving some of that Greek stuff to the Greeks might have helped in that regard.
The Other Place is at The Shed’s Griffin Theatre, 545 W 30th Street, NYC, now through March 1. For information on tickets, please visit: https://www.theshed.org/program/483-the-other-place.
Photos by Maria Baranova.
Headline photos: Tobias Menzies.
