This modern family psychodrama bills itself “after Antigone”, and seems at first like a bare-boned distillation of the Sophoclean tragedy. Alexander Zeldin’s sleek reworking, performed without an interval, certainly cuts to the chase.
We meet a modern blended family and the estranged Annie (Emma D’Arcy), who has a history of poor mental health. She, along with her meeker sister Issy (Alison Oliver), is in a prolonged state of mourning over an unstable father who killed himself years before, but whose ashes still lie in the house that his brother, Chris (Tobias Menzies), has taken over. It is these ashes that become the main point of contention.
It is a delicately observed portrait of a family imploding with grief and contesting memories, and weaves preoccupations around mental illness – and the othering of family members who live with it – with the sense of a family enacting eternal power battles.
Zeldin reminds us, implicitly, that Antigone was the daughter of Oedipus, whose story of incest and banishment was told in the earlier plays of the Theban cycle. The ancient Greek concept of fathers’ sins being visited on their children is enacted here in a high-wire blending, astonishing for its taut, riveting naturalism.
It takes place in a kitchen and Rosanna Vize’s set design appears mundane in its ordinariness but turns into a kind of domestic gothic through clever lighting and reflection (designed by James Farncombe), while the music, composed by Yannis Philippakis, buzzes with doomy energy. Every performance is compelling, but D’Arcy lights up the stage with an authenticity that feels searing. Although the curveball of Annie’s Oedipal inheritance brings surprise, it is ultimately the sibling relationship that hits hardest. It is arresting when Issy speaks of her grief being overshadowed by Annie’s. “He was my daddy too,” she shouts.
There are a few loose threads: the absence of Annie and Issy’s mother is unexplained and Terry (Jerry Killick), a third-rate predator who might be a version of Tiresias, the blind prophet of the original, seems less cohesively tied to the play, other than to display another variation of toxic masculinity.
It is an accomplishment that this drama generates gasping shocks with such an ancient story. Chris’s wife, Erica (Nina Sosanya), speaks about all that is forgiven in families, and you get the sense that these bereft characters will forge on in denial or forced forgetfulness.
Zeldin’s previous play, The Confessions, was quietly dazzling and this one comes with the same meticulous underpinning of ideas. Although lean at 80 minutes, its drama is huge.
At the Lyttelton theatre, National Theatre, London, until 9 November
