Discover what critics have had to say about Alexander Zeldin’s take on Antigone with our review round up.
The Stage: **** ” Bleak and bold reworking of the Antigone myth punchily performed by a formidable cast.”
The Guardian: **** “It is an accomplishment that this drama generates gasping shocks with such an ancient story.”
West End Best Friend: **** “Rosanna Vize’s set and costumes frame everything and everyone perfectly, and together with James Farncombe’s lighting, the staging presents a physical inside and outside that complements the actors’ psychological inner and outer shifts. The growing tension is subtly underscored with music by Yannis Philippakis and Josh Anio Grigg’s sound design.”
Time Out: *** “It’s a muddled showing from Zeldin the writer. But the elegant, ominous production from Zeldin the director ultimately salvages things, as do extremely committed performances from D’Arcy and Menzies. Their belief in this play very nearly carried me.”
The FT: ***** “Performances across the board are tremendous, reminding us that nearly every character carries their own grief. Oliver’s anxious Issy struggles to be heard; Jerry Killick, as the creepy project manager, bolts whenever the going gets tough. Most notable of all is Lee Braithwaite as Erica’s teenage child Leni, a teenager suddenly caught up in a nightmare.”
The Telegraph: **** “With a razor-sharp performance from the House of the Dragon star, this new version of the Greek tragedy is true sucker-punch theatre.”
The Standard: **** “all these quibbles can’t take away from the vivid family dynamic that Zeldin and his cast create here, which has affinities with his superb Inequalities Trilogy and 2023’s The Confessions, about his mother.”
London Theatre.co.uk: *** “There’s also not a clear point to this story, except, perhaps, to remind us that difficult people are often the product of difficult pasts. But it’s a play that develops slowly then drops a bombshell; a night at the theatre you won’t forget.”
London Unattached: ” As a study of grief, this production is an interesting piece. But this is not Antigone as we know her, this is something else entirely.”
WhatsOnStage: ***** “Underpinned by Yannis Philippakis’s half-heard score, the setting creates a sense of foreboding, an otherness which holds a group of astonishingly observed performances. The entire cast are superb, with Oliver finding sadness and humour within Issy’s constant wish to please, Braithwaite making Leni both balanced and kindly and Sosanya modulating beautifully from tactless do-goodery to despair.”
iNews: *** “The bleak endings of Greek tragedy bring with them a type of clarity and purity which Zeldin does not manage to replicate here with a finale of muted desolation that leaves several crucial points unresolved. Too much remains unexplained, too many details omitted, for catharsis to be achieved.”
The Reviews Hub: *** “Zeldin has the basis of a really interesting family drama and the tensions that emerge from the loss of a family member, but The Other Place feels slight and needs more time to establish the characters and make their desire to be free of their grief more tangible.”
The Upcoming: ***** “Alexander Zeldin’s take on Sophocles’s Antigone utilises well-known Greek tragedy tropes to create something fresh and simultaneously toe-curling. When brought face to face with the trauma, guilt and grief of others, the play refuses to let us turn away, no matter how hard it is to look.”
Broadway World: ***** “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.”
The Other Place will continue to play until the 9th November .