All in all, there were three workshops and then a six-week rehearsal period; D’Arcy and Menzies were attached from the beginning “because I love to write with actors in mind,” Zeldin explains. “It was a rich, particular, and unique process,” notes Menzies. “Straight off the bat, it felt like a really good combination of brains. It was very heady and emotional at times.”
A profound study of grief and the dynamics of relationships, punctuated by haunting music by Yannis Philippakis of Foals, The Other Place explores the classical Greek themes of honor, incest, and inheritance within the naturalistic capsule of a modern family. As in Oedipus—an adaptation of which is also playing in New York this season—the terrible need for the truth to come out shatters all attempts to keep it hidden. (In a sense, The Other Place actually continues the story of Oedipus, because Antigone and her sister Ismene—reimagined here as Annie and Issy—are Oedipus’s daughters.)
For D’Arcy, the appeal of Ancient Greek dramas to contemporary audiences is, in part, a matter of “scale”: “I think it is about their ability to hold emotional and psychic scale within a domestic space,” they say. “We are in a moment that has maybe outsized a lot of the theatrical work we were seeing. There is a search for a different kind of scale.”
They’re grateful if something like House of the Dragon is what’s driving people to engage with the material. “I like the workflow of this slightly mysterious, often quite confusing thing called profile, causing young people to go into theater spaces where they can have experiences that might be unlike many of their other experiences,” D’Arcy says. “That feels really hopeful. What people forget is that something can actually happen in a theater. I think that’s why its younger audiences really responded to it.”
Zeldin enthusiastically chimes in: “Yes, it’s one of the few spaces we have where it’s truly possible for something actually unmediated to happen.”
Then Menzies takes up the theme. “That’s why I think it’s increasingly important to push back the influence of Netflix on theater. You sometimes go to see theater and it is trying to mimic that stuff. That, for me, feels like an abnegation of our responsibility in theater. We’ve got to hold our ground and make it a space where people can commune together with ancient stories and big ideas and not have it turned into a widget.”
Like D’Arcy, Menzies loves acting onstage—but values his screen career, too. He became widely known for his sensitive portrayal of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, opposite Clare Foy’s Queen Elizabeth in The Crown and comes to The Other Place on the back of his starring role as Edwin Stanton in the historical epic Manhunt. His most recent film role was as a manipulative investor in Brad Pitt’s grand prix extravaganza F1.
“One of the things I love about my job is a need to shapeshift from different rooms,” he says, with a grin. “It’s the same stuff really, but you’re just turning the dial up to different levels, and obviously it can come out looking pretty different.”