Peter Viney's Blog

A new play by Alexander Zeldin
After Antigone
The National Theatre / The Zeldin Company

Directed by Alexander Zeldin
Set and costume Rosemary Vize
Composer Yannis Philippakis

Performed at the Lyttelton Theatre, 27 September to 9 November 2024

NT Live At Home, 2 October 2025

CAST
Lee Braithewaite – Leni
Emma D’Arcy- Anna
Jerry Killick – Terry
Tobias Menzies – Chris
Alison Oliver – Issy
Nina Sosanya – Erica

We have only just started with NT Live At Home. I fear I may find myself trying to review too many, though a lot will be re-watching things I’ve reviewed before. In spite of the irritating hour of passwords, and double checking to phone and email, then doing it all again, we finally managed to subscribe and get the App. So NT Live is at the cinema. NT Live At Home are the same things streamed.

London is becoming prohibitively expensive to visit. While the city monopolises the great NATIONAL institutions, we provincials are forced to pay congestion charges and £35 a day parking to enjoy the fruit of our taxes. Or we can subject ourselves to train strikes and cancellations and frankly piratical pricing. I was on the 17.35. Two girls had got on it and had tickets for the 18.35. £100 “fine” each! We used to stay overnight and do one play in the evening, and another the next matinee. Now hotel prices swing wildly. At one my son paid £85 one week. The next week it was £245 when we tried to book. Then three weeks later it was £110. So to NT Live At Home.

This is not a play we booked. We looked at the 2024 programme for the NT, considered and decided not. We were right in that it’s not our sort of thing. It’s very short (1 hour 22 minutes) to be worth a journey to London, and ‘a modern take on Antigone‘ didn’t appeal. I did by bit on the Theban plays years ago.

Chris lives in his dead brother’s house. He is married to Erica, and they have a son, Leni. His niece, Issy, has moved in with them recently, basically because she can’t afford to rent her own place anymore. She may feel entitled because it used to be the family home. There is a degree of carefully suppressed resentment. Erica has to smooth it over.

Chris and Erica have decided to remodel the house with huge picture windows as sliding doors. The set has the added layer of depth with the view through to the garden. One review said it looks deceptively like an Ayckbourn play with its detailed domestic setting. That’s right.

After many years, Chris has decide that today is the day to scatter his dead brother’s ashes, under a bench he’s donated to the park. He wants a fresh start. They are expecting the older sister, Annie, who is fragile mentally. They haven’t seen her for seven years.

When she turns up, Annie insists that the ashes stay in the house. Chris is insistent they must break with the past and scatter them. Chris can’t believe Annie refuses to co-operate. People have been invited for the event. She is truculent, distant, depressed. She also can’t accept that they will cut down the trees her father planted. ‘Grandfather,’ corrects Chris. (Given the Oedipus story, grandmother might have been better).

The NT blurb:
Two sisters reunite on the anniversary of the death of their father. Their uncle has remodelled their family home, in an attempt at a fresh start. But one sister’s sudden reappearance threatens to shatter this fragile idyll as she demands justice for the pain she carries. Amid the debris and the new extension, guilt, grief and greed battle it out in the family’s competing dreams of their future. When we are faced with the suffering of others, even those closest to us, can we look away?

If you can remember Antigone, and I have seen it at least twice, but can’t recall beyond the basics, there may be pleasure in thinking, ‘Ah! Annie = Antigone!’ ‘Issy = Ismene’ and ‘Chris =- Creon!’ I’m not sure how far you can take that line. Initial letters seem a clue, so is Terry or Tez Tiresias? Is Erica Euridice? I rechecked the Antigone synopsis. It’s quite a long way otherwise, the facts don’t parallel at all. The deceased is the father here, not the brother.

All the performances are powerfully emotive, especially Emma D’Arcy as the PTSD Annie and Tobias Menzies as the determined uncle, Chris. The really ugly costumes (especially Terry and Annie) and the house in the middle of major building support the grimness of the story.

Tobias Menzies carries a lot of power over from TV series. Obviously Game of Thrones, and then The Crown, where he was Prince Philip. However, for Outlander fans he had the twin roles of Frank Randall in 1945, married to Claire (Catriona Balfe) and then when time travel takes Claire to 1745, he plays Captain Jack Randall (Frank’s ancestor) who will assault her and torture and rape Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan). The last took a whole episode. He is terrifying in that and we carried the feeling across to this, where his decision to rid the house of the ashes and start afresh, give way to cruelty and fury. He never ceases to remind Annie that she has a history of mental problems. Annie is banished in the cold to a tent in the garden … seen through the picture window. (Antigone was banished to a cave in the Theban play). Lighting is exemplary.

Emma D’Arcy matches him. You recall that Antigone’s father was Oedipus and that Antigone was mourning her brother, not her father. It will turn out that there is previous with Uncle Chris. Father? Brother? Uncle? I guess they kept it all in the family.

Alison Oliver is Issy, the younger sister. She finally snaps after years of ‘Look at poor grief-stricken me’ from Annie, and breaks into ‘He’s my daddy too!’ anger.

Leni (Lee Braithwaite) is the cousin, and the least self-absorbed character, in that he cares and tries to help. He is upset by all the anger and fuss throughout.

Erica (Nina Sosanya) has to put up with it all, watching quietly, trying to patch over the cracks. After all, they’re not her family, just relatives by marriage, yet she is thrown into the middle of it.

Terry (Jerry Killick ) or ‘Tez’ is the obnoxious neighbour of many years standing, and a builder doing the house renovations. He is a really odd character, providing comic relief … you only have to look at him. He turns predatory when drunk, but is easily seen off by Issy.

Assessing NT At Home will be difficult. You lose one step of the live charisma moving from being at the theatre to streaming in the cinema, and then another moving to ‘At Home.’ Reviewers thought it better than we did. We admired the performance, but disliked the play. Also, critics get great seats. For such an intimate and angst-ridden play, the Lyttelton might have been good for the critics but it’s too wide and seats 890. We have felt very uninvolved in the cheaper seats there, way back from that abnormally wide proscenium stage. I can see this knocking us out in a more intimate theatre (Donmar, Menier, Minerva) where you are close to all the emotion. I reckon we’d have ended up at the back of the Lyttelton balcony so for us it actually was better streamed with close ups. This may be true of the Lyttelton theatre generally.

***

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
5 star
Financial Times *****
What’s On Stage *****
Arts Desk *****
4 star
Guardian ****
Evening Standard ****
Telegraph ****
The Stage ****

LINKS
TOBIA MENZIES
Outlander

EMMA D’ARCY
Mothering Sunday (film)

ALISON OLIVER
Dancing at Lughnasa, National Theatre 2023

NINA SOSAYANA
Ivanov, Chichester 2015
Platanov, Chichester 2015