Emma D’Arcy, Tobias Menzies, and Alexander Zeldin Explore Greek Plays

“Reading Greek plays feels a bit like a migraine. There’s a conundrum or knot inside them that I don’t immediately understand—and the work is trying to investigate the knot,” says Emma D’Arcy, thoughtfully. D’Arcy, recognizable to fans of House of the Dragon as Rhaenyra Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne, is talking about The Other Place, loosely based on Sophocles’s Antigone, which is about to open at The Shed in New York. This devastating version isn’t set in ancient Greece, and its heroine Annie—played by D’Arcy—isn’t the king’s daughter. Instead, the character is an alienated young woman returning to a blended family, where her uncle Chris (Tobias Menzies) is trying to build a life with his new wife and wants to bury his brother’s ashes, which are still in the family home. Annie is unutterably opposed to this. As D’Arcy explains: “At its simplest level, you have one character who is driven to reveal the past, the truth, history, and you have another who is desperate to hide and to disguise and to bury, and that becomes the fundamental mechanics of the tragedy.” The result is a searing drama that had audiences at the National Theatre in London, where the production opened at the end of 2024, gasping in surprise, shock, and sympathy. “I’ve rarely been in a show that just lit up the room,” says Menzies, quietly. “There were lots of times when we were genuinely ahead of the audience, and that’s an increasingly hard thing to do because audiences are very story-literate. To have people not quite see what’s welling up from underneath their feet is electric.” We are talking on Zoom along with Alexander Zeldin, who wrote and directed The Other Place. He’s best known for The Inequalities Trilogy, a series of plays that examine the lives of people who live in poverty. (Love, one of the trio, was staged at the Park Avenue Armory in 2023.) The Other Place was the first time he had been commissioned to work on an existing text. “It was a very uncomfortable starting point for me,” Zeldin says. “And I realized very early on that I couldn’t do a straight, modern adaptation. So, I went away and did a lot of thinking and found a way.” He is speaking from the Greek island of Hydra, where coincidentally he wrote the first draft. “I think a piece of theater is an event. It’s something that you do in 3D. It’s not a purely literary activity, although it starts from there. Being in Greece for a while, it became clear it would need to be a deeper investigation of the resonance of the play.” 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.” D’Arcy’s next big screen appearance, apart from the fourth season of House of the Dragon—to be released in the summer—will be Digger, the new film from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, starring Tom Cruise. “That was unlike anything else I’ve done,” they say. “With Alejandro, the benchmark is way up on the ceiling. On most film sets, there’s traditionally what one desires in a piece of work and the practical reality, and then the work becomes a compromise between those two poles. With Alejandro, it’s sort of his will or no way. The man has such vision. Also, Tom Cruise is brilliant. He is amazing and he’ll be amazing in this film.” But for now, everyone’s attention is on the transfer of The Other Place. “What I am most looking forward to is getting in the rehearsal room and deepening what we have,” says Zeldin. “I love coming back to work; I always think it gets better on the second time around. I don’t want to get too political, but this is a magical opportunity to do things that are at the frontier, art that is a bit out there. This is not the moment to settle for the middle ground.” The Other Place is at The Shed from January 30–March 1.