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ZELDIN AGAIN
I sometimes feel real sympathy (possibly unwanted) for actors who, trained and motivated to channel and express extreme and painful emotions, do their absolute and skilful best but find themselves having to do it in a mediocre play. Even if it is preceded by long rehearsal analysis of their character, and garlanded with learned programme notes about Sophocles and essays about how we don’t do grief properly any more. And even if it is written and directed by the famous Alexander Zeldin, chevalier des arts et lettres and darling of the NT (his tribute to his mother, The Confessions, was the last one her, an evening weirdly depressing to any actual live mother).
Here, in a modern kitchen set with patio doors (much discussed in a mumbly sort of way) we have a family gathering headed by the excellent Tobias Menzies as Uncle Chris. This fine actor will be required in turn to be sensible , a bit controlling and normal, then shouty, and borderline deranged by the end. There’s also sterling work by Emma d’Arcy as his niece, returning to join her siblings in the remodelled family house where Chris and they live. She’s back after spending some considerable time stumping around with a huge rucksack, full of her late Dad’s shirts, a tent, and some seething, grieving rage. Both performances are good. So are the others (though Alison Oliver too-often delivers a TV-naturalistic performance only barely audible by row G).
But for all the skill and effort, and the insistence that it’s based on Sophocles’ Antigone, it doesn’t fly however hard they all pedal, however surreally rackety the occasional soundscape, however mysterious the huge white reversible screen overhead (design by Rosanna Vize, music Yannis Phillippakis).
What is happening is that Chris wanted to get them all together to scatter his later brother’s ashes (in a surprisingly small vase, I’ve seen ashes and there are clearly some missing). They are all grieving the long-absent Alan, who seems tohave killed himself in the garden beyond the patio doors. Chris is very keen on cutting down some trees. But when Annie arrives, she insists the ashes must stay in the house forever, so she can “talk to them..he died here, he needs to stay here”. Thats the Antigone bit: uncle-defiance and views about human remains.
She steals some ashes, and Uncle Chris gets furious and wrestles her for them, and there’s a fair bit of decanting , wasting still more of the inadequate supply. Their friend and project-manager Tez wanders in and out, once with a takeaway, observing that “no-one takes any banter in the country these days”. Night falls, Annie decides to sleep in her tent in the garden, everyone is uneasy about everything and quite angry, except Issy , who seems almost sane about it all and occasionally tells Annie she loves her.
There’s a denouement – of course there’s a Bad Secret in this family, and of course it’s sexual (we’re in 2024, audiences expect no less). Sophocles didn’t need to bother with all that stuff because there were real wars and executions and , importantly, a concept of personal honour-unto-death rather than the kind of wallowing emotional unwellness fashionable dramatists prefer today.
So after the 80 minutes of intensely trying to care about these people I left the NT defeated. But Menzies and d’Arcy are both strikingly good, and give it all they’ve got. Respectful sympathies.
I am now quite upset that owing to theatrecat’s sadly necessary travel-rationing I missed the Dorfman show with Meera Syal the other night. That sounds better.
nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 9 Nov
Rating two
theatreCat 