The Brits are at it again.
Robert Icke’s “Oedipus,” which just closed on Broadway after an initial run in London, updates the Sophocles tragedy to a contemporary political contest in the U.K. Now comes Alexander Zeldin’s “The Other Place,” which opened Wednesday at The Shed after a London premiere in 2024.
Zeldin updates Sophocles’ “Antigone” to a contemporary kitchen-sink drama in which Annie (Emma D’Arcy of “House of the Dragon” fame) wants to keep her dead father’s ashes in his house. The problem is, her uncle, Chris (Tobias Menzies of “The Crown”), who now lives in that house with his wife, Erica (Lorna Brown), wants to scatter the ashes. We immediately side with Chris, since his brother and Annie’s father has been dead for several years.
Icke’s “Oedipus” garnered rave reviews. I found it mildly engaging as a clever parody of the original in which every plot point is given a contempo spin: Oedipus’ birth secret is turned into a nasty birtherism attack, Oedipus blinds himself not with Jocasta’s dress pins but rather her stiletto heels, etc. It was fun to watch, but hardly the so-called Prestige Event of this Broadway season.
“The Other Place” is a far looser adaptation and update. Beyond the too cute name changes — Annie/Antigone, Chris/Creon, Erica/Eurydice and the soothsayer Terry/Tiresias (Jerry Killick) — “The Other Place” plays like an improv exercise in which actors, who are only vaguely familiar with the Sophocles classic, are put on a stage with an urn full of ashes and directed, “To now gives us ‘Antigone.’”
In the original, Antigone wants to provide a respectful burial for her brother while Creon, before he has a change of heart, doesn’t even want Polynices mourned, much less buried. Clearly, “The Other Place” tells a somewhat different story, which makes those cute name changes especially annoying.
Family members fighting over a dead relatives’ ashes means something quite different today than it did millennium ago. Still, the subject has its fascination. I knew an old married couple who kept their son’s ashes on a bookcase in the living room and when people asked about the urn, they offered an apology, asking, “Do you think we’re crazy?” Another family I knew fought over their mother’s ashes, some of the kids wanting her buried, the others wanting to divide the ashes as a kind of memento that they could keep with them in their respective homes.
How we mourn is an intriguing subject. Alexander Zeldin, who also directs here, mucks it up by giving the uncle Chris even nastier sins than Creon. One of those transgressions has turned into a tired cliché for any male villain in the Era of Epstein. Worse, when a Greek tragedy is reduced to 80 minutes (the running time here), you end up with nothing more than a tawdry soap opera. It is made palatable by Menzies’ enormously empathetic performance – that is, until the tacky finale when Chris begs for our forgiveness.
D’Arcy is so dogged in presenting Annie’s plight that their final act of violence is not tragic. It’s just pure retribution.
