Using Sophocles’ Antigone as his jumping off point, and preserving the classical unities, writer and director Alexander Zeldin confronts the madness of grief within a dysfunctional modern family. There are serious sexual past misdemeanours and present conflicts.
The family is gathering in the house of Chris (Tobias Menzies) and his new wife Erica (Nina Sosanya) to attend a memorial to scatter his late brother Adam’s ashes. Except the house was once Adam’s family home, where his girls, Annie (Emma D’Arcy) and Issy (Alison Oliver), grew up. Is Chris the usurper?
Chris and Erica are renovating it, knocking walls down, admiring the new sliding doors. Pretty innocuous, it seems. There’s also a project manager and friend, a chorus if you like, Terry (Jerry Killick), who provides the light relief with his fart jokes, if not the creepy drunken pass at Issy. There’s something about the two men in this play that reeks of male entitlement.
Adam’s younger daughter Issy is living with them, as she can’t afford London rents—very now. Annie, the first daughter, has been estranged since her father’s suicide, but returns to stop the scattering of the ashes. She demands they stay in the house.
Her sparring with Uncle Chris has history. She was sent away when her father died, but old wounds and power play reopen. If you know Magritte’s "Lovers" painting of 1928 (Chris puts a red cloth over his head and Annie joins him underneath), I don't need to reveal the spoiler. In any case, the National Theatre web site gives a synopsis for the sensitive.
Grief can derange the mind—as it has Annie’s. Others want to forget and move on—as Issy does. Is Chris ridden with guilt? Everyone deals with grief in their own way. It can bring families together or break them apart, as the ancients knew full well. This ends tragically, of course. It is loosely based on Antigone after all—you have your clues.
There is an element of farce with stolen and mislaid ashes. Not baked in a pie, but shoved down trousers and poured into sandwich bags. Grief can’t be so easily distracted. Poor Erica and her son Leni (Lee Braithwaite) are the onlookers in their “forever home” as Erica happily calls it.
Annie, upset and disturbed, sets up her father’s old tent in the garden amongst the trees Chris is threatening to cut down (Chekhov anyone?). She also finds and wears his old clothes that Erica was bagging up to give away.
What lifts this eighty-minute chamber piece, a bit Pinteresque with its lengthy silences, a bit Beckettian in Chris’s final stooped body language and silent scream, is James Farncombe’s lighting, truly brilliant if you excuse the pun. And Rosanna Vize’s set design.
The glass sliding doors reflect the protagonists through a glass darkly, but also briefly, by an adjustment, us—we can gawp back out at ourselves. It is universal, this befuddling grief, it comes to us all: “If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come”… It is impossible to prepare for the pain that never goes away.
The acting is fine, method, often minimal—Sosanya and Braithwaite have little to do but watch. And Yannis Philippakis’s (Foals lead singer, songwriter and guitarist) soundscore barely intrudes—tactfully.
Is the National Theatre having a moment of confronting family grief—A Tupperware of Ashes is playing in the Dorfman—and perhaps global grief? Doesn't Sophocles say somewhere that there’s nothing stranger than man?
Or should one be quoting Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”? Annie is a chip off the old block Terry suggests: she’s weird, with a backpack full of medication. A troubled soul in a crass universe... “Don’t look at me”, Chris shouts at the end. Why?