The Other Place at the National Theatre review: Emma D’Arcy is riveting in this elegant, atmospheric take on Greek tragedy

Does tragedy run in the family? That’s the question writer-director Alexander Zeldin takes from his source text, Sophocles’ Antigone, for this elegantly acted, powerfully atmospheric but remorselessly fatalistic updating.

A crack cast of six including Tobias Menzies, House of the Dragon star Emma D’Arcy, and Alison Oliver helped devise the hyper-naturalistic dialogue, in which familial awkwardness at least brings some light relief.

In the original, King Creon refuses to let his neice (Oedipus’s daughter Antigone) bury her slain brother, a decision that destroys her and Creon’s family. Here, the issue is the ownership of a dead father’s memory and his Oxfordshire home.

The unnamed dad of Annie (D’Arcy) and Issy (Oliver) killed himself after a period of mental disturbance, we gather – a condition possibly shared by Annie. His brother Chris (Menzies) stepped in, but at some point in her teens Annie became alienated and exiled.

Now in her 20s she’s returned, reluctantly and resentfully, because Chris is aggressively remodeling the house for his new wife (Nina Sosanya) and stepchild Leni (Lee Braithwaite) and wants to get rid of his brother’s ashes.

There’s a huge amount of foreshadowing and doomsaying in the script, references to dark past secrets and predictions of chaos for Chris and Annie when the latter returns.

Much of this comes from Chris’s friend and project manager on the rebuild, Terry (Jerry Killick), a straggle-haired lout in flip-flops whose lairy approaches to Issy add to the miasma of creepy sexual wrongness that hangs over Rosanna Vize’s open-plan living room set. The sliding garden doors Chris has installed are an obvious metaphor for a family that can’t keep its secrets hidden.

Though a gloomy fate seems inevitable, and the show is just 80 minutes long, most of the characters are beautifully realised. Menzies gives us a finely detailed picture of a man who wants to be the ‘fun uncle’ and the matey stepdad but is implacable when his authority is challenged. He finds humanity in a horrible, compromised man.

Oliver, Braithwaite and Sosanya sketch in entire emotional backstories with a few deft touches such Issy’s nervously jiggling knee.

The exception is Annie. Which is not D’Arcy’s fault. The non-binary actor’s stage time is limited but massively impactful. I was riveted by their grieving stillness, their understated delivery of devastating lines.

The problem with Annie, as with Antigone, is that she’s solely defined by grief and intransigence. In the updating, other factors are in play but they make the character less rather than more rounded.

Being picky, I also have issues with the timeline: at least 10 years seem to have elapsed since the father’s death; what happened in the interim and why is everything coming to a head now? The last two minutes ruin what could have been a perfect ending.

But 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.

It’s gloomy but duh: it’s based on a Greek tragedy. What did we expect?

National Theatre, to November 9; nationaltheatre.org.uk