Don’t Look at Me: “The Other Place” and the Tragedy Critics Missed

When Alexander Zeldin’s “The Other Place” premiered at London’s National Theatre in 2024, critics hailed it as “the outstanding play of the year” and praised its “taut, riveting naturalism.” That same production, now transferred to The Shed with most of its original cast, has met a decidedly cooler reception from New York critics who seem baffled by what they perceive as an awkward, underwritten attempt to modernize Sophocles’ “Antigone.” The complaints are remarkably consistent: the play lacks the gods, fates, and moral weight of Greek tragedy; the central conflict over scattering a dead father’s ashes has “risibly low stakes;” the shocking revelation in the final act feels like a cheap trick rather than classical inevitability. But this critical consensus misses what Zeldin has written. “The Other Place” is not a retelling of “Antigone” for modern audiences—Zeldin states this explicitly in his program notes. Instead, he has created a devastating psychological portrait of incestuous abuse and its multigenerational trauma, one that uses the structure of Greek tragedy to explore how families destroy themselves when terrible secrets demand to remain buried. The Atlantic critics wanted Creon’s political decree. What Zeldin gives them is far more unbearable: the long aftermath of a crime that has no redemption.

On the surface, “The Other Place” presents a straightforward family drama. Annie (Emma D’Arcy) returns to her childhood home for the first time in years, summoned by her uncle Chris (Tobias Menzies) to scatter her father Adam’s ashes on the tenth anniversary of his death. Chris has been living in his dead brother’s house with his new wife Erica (Lorna Brown) and her child Leni (Lee Braithwaite), and they’ve just completed an extensive renovation—knocking down walls, installing expansive new windows, opening the kitchen to flood the once-dark space with light. Annie’s younger sister Issy (Ruby Stokes) lives there too, having recently moved back home. The plan is simple: gather at a nearby park where Chris has installed a memorial bench and donated substantially to a mental health charity, scatter the ashes, and finally “move on” from the tragedy of Adam’s suicide.

But Annie refuses. She wants her father’s ashes to remain in the house “where he wanted to be.” What follows is an escalating battle of wills between uncle and niece, with the urn of ashes becoming a grotesque football—Chris even partitions them into a plastic baggie at one point, offering Annie “her share.” The conflict seems rooted in Annie’s obvious mental health struggles (she’s been transient, living by the sea, on various medications) and Chris’s understandable desire to build a new life without the physical reminder of his brother’s suicide haunting his home. When Annie steals the ashes and Chris violently searches her belongings and body to retrieve them, she sets up her old tent in the garden rather than leave. The play hurtles toward its shocking revelation and tragic conclusion over the course of a single day and night.

But the ashes are not what this play is about. They are simply the catalyst that forces long-buried truth to the surface. “The Other Place” is a play about incestuous abuse and its enduring trauma—specifically, the sexual exploitation of a grieving sixteen-year-old girl by her uncle in the summer following her father’s suicide. Everything that seems confusing or unclear in the “surface” story clicks into devastating focus once you understand that Chris and Annie’s relationship is not that of estranged uncle and troubled niece, but of abuser and victim locked in the terrible intimacy of shared secret.

Consider what we learn about that summer ten years ago. After Adam hanged himself in the trees behind the house, Chris moved in to care for his orphaned nieces. He bought Annie a tent and they set it up in the forest. They took the urn of ashes out there and “slept with it,” as Annie tells Erica in Act One—a detail that seems merely eccentric until its full meaning becomes clear. In Act Two, alone with Chris in the early morning hours, Annie finally speaks the truth they’ve both been avoiding: “After he died, we took it in turns. We went to him. We sat on the floor of that tent and we talked to him. We pretended to be him, we took it turns, and you held me. You were tender then.” Chris’s response—”That was a mistake. I was upset. I wasn’t thinking straight”—is the classic language of an abuser deflecting responsibility. When Annie asks why he sent her away to boarding school after that summer, Chris can barely articulate the answer: “because the summer I was here with you was the last time I was alive.”

The promise Annie keeps referencing—that the ashes would stay in the house, that she could speak to her father—was made during this period of abuse. Her insistence on keeping the ashes isn’t about honoring her father; it’s about holding Chris to the one promise he made to her when he was “tender,” when he positioned himself as caretaker and protector while violating that role in the most fundamental way possible. Her homelessness, her medications, her “pharmacy” of pills, her inability to maintain housing or relationships—these aren’t signs of inherent mental illness. They’re the documented consequences of childhood sexual abuse by a trusted family member during a period of acute grief and vulnerability.

And Chris’s entire adult life—the unexplained wealth, the marriage to Erica, the obsessive renovation of his dead brother’s house, the repeated insistence on a “fresh start”—is an elaborate structure built to bury what happened in that tent. Every wall he knocks down is an attempt to transform the crime scene. Every window he installs is meant to flood the darkness with light and declare the past erased. The memorial bench, the substantial donation to mental health charities—these are acts of expiation that allow him to perform the role of bereaved brother without ever confronting what he did to his brother’s child. When he violently searches Annie’s body for the stolen ashes, grabbing at her pockets and trousers in what the script describes as “a strangely almost erotic struggle,” he is repeating the original violation, proving that the “fresh start” is a fiction and the abuser remains.

The play’s climactic moment—when Chris and Annie kiss after he finally agrees to let the ashes stay—is described in the script as “the live consummation of what has been for years a secret.” It is witnessed by Erica, who has built her marriage on a foundation she now discovers was quicksand. When the truth comes out, Issy flees with the ashes to scatter them, Annie returns to the tent, and by dawn she is dead—suicide strongly implied by the blood on Leni’s hands and Erica’s scream. Like Antigone, Annie would rather die than live in a world where her father disappears and her abuser’s secret remains hidden. Unlike Antigone, her death is not noble defiance but the final, unbearable cost of trauma she’s carried since she was sixteen years old.

So where does Antigone fit into all of this? Zeldin insists in his program notes that “The Other Place” is not “a ‘version’ of Antigone, or a retelling of it for a modern audience or anything like that.” The critics who complained that the play lacks the moral weight and mythic inevitability of Greek tragedy seem not to have believed him, or perhaps not to have understood what he meant. What Zeldin has done is far more sophisticated than a simple modernization: he has used the structure of Sophocles’ tragedy to explore how similar dynamics play out in contemporary psychological terms.

The parallels are precise. Chris is Creon, the authority figure who insists his decree cannot be questioned, who frames his stubbornness as necessary for moving forward and building a future. Annie is Antigone, demanding justice for the dead and refusing to compromise even when compliance would save her life. Issy is Ismene, the younger sister who wants peace and survival, who sides with authority until the truth makes that position untenable. Even Tez functions as a corrupt Tiresias—the prophet who sees the truth (“You know where this leads…It leads to hell”) but is morally compromised himself, as his attempted assault on Issy makes clear.

The conflict over the ashes maps directly onto Antigone’s insistence on burying her brother against Creon’s decree. In both cases, the fight isn’t really about the dead body—it’s about who has the authority to decide how we honor the past and who gets erased in service of the future. And crucially, in both cases, the conflict is unresolvable because the stakes are existential: Antigone cannot abandon her principles without abandoning herself; Annie cannot let her father’s ashes leave without erasing the one promise that tethered her to the world after she was violated.

The tent functions as Antigone’s cave—the place of isolation where she dies alone, cut off from the community. But it’s also the site of the original crime, which makes Annie’s return there both Antigone’s defiant retreat and a reenactment of her father’s suicide in the trees. The compressed timeframe of a single day and night echoes the classical unities. Even the play’s final moments, with Chris breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly, transforms us into the gods and chorus he’s been trying to escape. “Don’t look at me!” he screams at us, but we cannot look away—we are the witnesses, the judges, the divine forces whose gaze traps him in eternal torment.

What confused the critics is that Zeldin has not mapped the content of Sophocles onto a modern setting. He’s found the modern equivalents of the ancient conflicts. What makes someone insist on principle over compromise? In Sophocles, it’s religious duty and honor. In Zeldin, it’s unhealed trauma and the demand for truth. What makes an authority figure refuse to bend? In Sophocles, it’s political necessity and pride. In Zeldin, it’s the need to keep a guilty secret buried. What are the stakes of the conflict? In Sophocles, it’s the health of the body politic. In Zeldin, it’s a child’s soul.

The critics wanted gods and oracles, political decrees and noble defiance. What they got was something more faithful to Sophocles than they realized: a play about how human beings destroy themselves and each other when terrible truths demand to remain hidden. Chris’s final fate—trapped in purgatory, unable to escape the audience’s gaze, stuck in the eternal present of his exposed crime—is pure Greek tragedy. He is Oedipus after the revelation, Creon after his son’s suicide, a man who has committed the unforgivable and must live forever with that knowledge. The hole the critics claimed was missing—the gods, the fates—turns out to be us. We are the divine judgment Chris cannot escape.

But there’s another layer to this exposure. When Chris screams “Don’t look at me!” he’s not just pleading with the gods—he’s indicting everyone who has watched this play unfold while focusing on the ashes, the renovation, the surface family drama. We, too, have been complicit in the comfortable misreading. We’ve sat in the darkness of the theater watching a trauma narrative while preferring to think about whether the ashes should be scattered or kept. Zeldin makes us recognize that our desire for the play to be about something else—anything else—mirrors the family’s desire not to see what Chris has done. The fourth wall break doesn’t just expose Chris; it exposes our own resistance to witnessing unbearable truth.

Understanding this structure helps explain why the performances must work on multiple levels simultaneously—carrying both the surface story of a family conflict and the terrible weight of what’s actually happening beneath it. This is extraordinarily difficult material to perform, requiring actors who can navigate naturalistic family dynamics while carrying the weight of unspeakable secrets. The cast, imported largely from the National Theatre production, rises to the challenge with performances of remarkable precision and control.

Emma D’Arcy’s Annie is a masterclass in embodying trauma. As one critic noted, D’Arcy speaks with “a strange, swallowed intonation, as though they’re slowly remembering how to talk”—the voice of someone whose capacity for normal human connection was severed at sixteen. D’Arcy makes Annie’s “weirdness” utterly legible: the battered metal water bottle she drinks from obsessively, the backpack stuffed with old food and medications, the way she wraps herself in her father’s oversized clothes like armor. There’s nothing performed or exaggerated about this portrait of mental illness; it feels lived-in and true. When Annie finally speaks the truth about that summer in the tent, D’Arcy doesn’t play it as revelation or catharsis but as something closer to confession—the words coming out quietly, almost wonderingly, as if she’s surprised to be saying them aloud after all these years.

Tobias Menzies gives Chris the smooth surface of a successful man while letting us see the rot beneath. His Chris is all nervous energy barely contained, a man who has spent a decade building a life on a foundation of sand and knows at some level it cannot hold. The performance is most powerful in its moments of violence—when Chris physically searches Annie’s body for the ashes, when he dumps her belongings across the floor, the violation is sickeningly familiar, a man who has done this before. But Menzies also finds the pathetic in Chris, particularly in the final scene when he places a tea towel over his head like a child playing pretend and admits “the summer I was here with you was the last time I was alive.” The kiss that follows is not romantic or passionate but desperate and doomed, and Menzies plays Chris’s realization of what he’s done—not just now but ten years ago—with devastating clarity. His final breakdown, screaming “Don’t look at me!” at the audience while breaking the walls of the theater, is genuinely unhinged, a man trapped in eternal torment with nowhere left to hide.

The ensemble work is equally strong. Ruby Stokes captures Issy’s younger-sister energy—the panic eating, the brittle humor, the way she positions herself as peacemaker until the truth makes peace impossible. Her fury at Annie in the final scene (“I don’t like you”) is heartbreaking precisely because we understand it’s self-protection, a young woman who cannot afford to acknowledge what’s been done to her sister lest she see her own complicity. Lorna Brown’s Erica is the play’s most sympathetic figure, a woman genuinely trying to build a home who discovers she’s married to a man she doesn’t know. Brown plays Erica’s final line to Chris—”You’ve wasted me”—with such quiet devastation that it lands harder than any scream. Lee Braithwaite’s Leni is the play’s moral center, the only character innocent enough to cross boundaries and ask the questions no one else will ask, and Braithwaite gives the role an androgynous grace that makes Leni’s vulnerability at the end—emerging from the tent with blood on their hands—almost unbearable to watch.

And Jerry Killick’s Tez deserves special mention as the play’s most unsettling creation. Killick plays him as perpetually overfamiliar, a man who treats other people’s homes and other people’s trauma as his personal entertainment. His assault on Issy—the sudden lunge for a kiss, the insistence that she was “flirting”—is staged to feel casual, almost incidental, which makes it all the more disturbing. This is a world where predation is normalized, where men feel entitled to women’s bodies, where Tez can attempt to sexually assault a young woman and minutes later be eating takeaway at the family table. Killick makes him grotesque without ever tipping into caricature.

These performances are supported by direction and design that understand the play’s dual nature—the realistic surface and the mythic undertow. As director of his own work, Zeldin demonstrates the skills that made his previous play “Love” such a success at the Park Avenue Armory. He works in a mode of heightened naturalism where silences carry as much weight as dialogue and small physical actions—Leni spinning in a vintage chair, Issy panic-eating cereal from the box, Chris obsessively testing the new sliding doors—reveal character and tension. The pacing is ruthless; at 80 minutes with no intermission, the play offers no escape and no relief. Zeldin stages moments of violence with shocking physicality while never letting them tip into melodrama, and he knows exactly when to let scenes breathe and when to accelerate into chaos.

One critic complained that the production feels “awkwardly staged” in The Shed’s Griffin Theater, with the set “way too large to tell the story” and creating “an uncomfortable split focus.” But this vastness is precisely the point. Rosanna Vize’s set design gives us a cavernous kitchen-in-renovation, all exposed beams and construction debris, with the furniture and family dwarfed by the space they’re trying to make into a home. The expanse from the kitchen island to the back door is a gulf that characters must cross to reach each other—and when they do reach each other, the contact is almost always violent or transgressive. The new picture windows that Erica and Chris celebrate for letting in light are enormous glass panels that expose everything, turning the interior into an aquarium where privacy is impossible. And suspended above it all is James Farncombe’s masterstroke: a huge rectangular panel of light that pivots slowly between scenes, rising and setting like a sun but also suggesting surveillance, exposure, the unblinking eye of judgment.

Farncombe’s lighting design works in chiaroscuro contrasts, carving the actors out of shadow in ways that suggest both film noir and Francis Bacon paintings. The tent glowing in the darkness of the garden through those transparent windows becomes an accusation, a beacon, a grave. And in the final moments, Farncombe brings up the houselights, eliminating the protective darkness of the theater and forcing complete exposure for both Chris and the audience who must witness him.

Yannis Philippakis, frontman of the band Foals, has created a score that works as much through absence as presence. Long stretches play in near-silence, broken only by the sounds of daily life—until suddenly the music surges in with electronic drones and insistent rhythms that feel less like underscore than like the aural manifestation of guilt and dread. Josh Anio Grigg’s sound design is equally sophisticated, working with what the program notes describe as “ASMR-inspired” precision. We hear every crunch of Leni’s apple, every gurgle of Annie’s water bottle, every ping of a text message notification. These tiny sounds accumulate to create unbearable tension, our senses heightened to the breaking point. When Tez describes birds tearing each other apart over chips outside Al Shami’s, we don’t need to see them—Grigg’s soundscape has already trained us to hear the violence beneath the ordinary.

The tent itself, designed by Vize as a cobalt blue pop-up shelter, appears first as a scrap of fabric in a pile of dead Adam’s clothes, then transforms into the play’s most potent symbol. Annie assembles it with practiced efficiency in the garden, and once erected it dominates the visual field—visible through the windows, glowing from within when Annie retreats there, finally becoming her tomb. The tent is crime scene and refuge, past and present, the place where a father figure violated his role and where his victim chooses to end her suffering.

Zeldin and his creative team have also made the wise choice to keep certain elements ambiguous. We never see Annie’s body. We see Leni emerge from the tent with what appears to be blood, we hear Erica’s scream, but the final image is of Chris alone, trapped in his exposure. This restraint—showing us the consequences without the graphic detail—makes the tragedy more devastating, not less. We are left with the knowledge of what has happened and the image of a man who cannot escape it.

So why did New York critics miss what London critics saw so clearly? Several factors seem to be at work. First, the recent Broadway production of Robert Icke’s Oedipus, which modernized Sophocles with mixed results and closed after disappointing reviews, appears to have created skepticism about Greek tragedy updates as a category. Critics approached “The Other Place” expecting another failed attempt to force ancient structures onto contemporary stories, and they found what they were looking for.

Second, there’s the MacGuffin problem. Critics focused on the ashes—are they scattered or kept, is this a reasonable conflict, do the stakes justify the intensity—without recognizing that the ashes are simply the mechanism that forces the real conflict into the open. It’s as if they reviewed Hamlet and complained that the plot hinges on an implausible ghost. The ashes matter because of what they represent to Annie and Chris, not because of any inherent importance.

Third, critics arrived with expectations that Zeldin had already disavowed in his program notes. They wanted a modern Antigone and judged the play for failing to deliver what it never promised. When they complain about the “hole where the ancient gods, fates and rituals should be,” they’re critiquing their own expectations rather than Zeldin’s achievement.

Finally, there’s the uncomfortable possibility that critics didn’t want to see what Zeldin was showing them. A play about incestuous abuse of a grieving teenager is harder to process than a play about competing philosophies of honoring the dead. It’s easier to dismiss the revelation as a “cheap trick” than to acknowledge that Zeldin has seeded it throughout, that every interaction between Chris and Annie carries the weight of what happened in that tent. The play asks us to witness something unbearable—not just the abuse itself, but the way families and systems fail to protect children, the way abusers build respectable lives on top of their crimes, the way victims carry trauma that makes them seem “crazy” while their abusers seem “normal.” Perhaps it’s not surprising that critics preferred to focus on whether the Antigone parallels work rather than sit with what Zeldin is dramatizing.

But what Zeldin has achieved deserves recognition on its own terms. “The Other Place” is Greek tragedy, just not the kind that makes us feel the comfortable distance of 2,500 years. Zeldin has not modernized Sophocles—he has found the modern equivalent of Sophocles’ concerns and staged them with unflinching honesty. The result is a play that understands tragedy not as elevated suffering ennobled by poetry and fate, but as the unbearable aftermath of crimes that destroy everyone they touch.

Annie is Antigone, but she’s also every survivor of childhood sexual abuse who carries trauma that makes them unemployable, unhoused, medicated, and dismissed as “crazy.” Chris is Creon, but he’s also every abuser who positions himself as a pillar of the community while the evidence of his crime lives in poverty and pain. The ashes are not “risibly low stakes”—they are the physical manifestation of a promise made to a sixteen-year-old girl by the man who was supposed to protect her and instead violated her. When Chris insists on scattering them to “move on,” he demands that his victim erase the one thing tethering her to the world. When Annie refuses, she chooses truth over survival. That is the highest stakes imaginable.

In his final moments, Chris screams “Don’t look at me!” at the audience, breaking the fourth wall and turning us into the gods and chorus his entire life has been designed to avoid. He is stuck in purgatory, forced to perform his guilt eternally before witnesses who cannot look away. This is the tragic fate the critics claimed was missing—not death, but eternal exposure, the complete destruction of the carefully constructed self. It is Oedipus after the revelation, Creon after his son’s suicide, a man who must live forever with the knowledge of what he has done.

And perhaps this explains why the play has proven so divisive. When Chris screams “Don’t look at me!” at the audience in his final moments, he demands that we acknowledge what we’ve just witnessed—and what we’ve been trying not to see throughout. We are not innocent spectators of this tragedy. We, like the critics who complained about low stakes and implausible revelations, have been watching a play about incestuous abuse while preferring to debate the merits of Greek tragedy adaptation. The houselights coming up in that final moment aren’t just theatrical technique; they’re moral reckoning. Zeldin refuses to let us hide in the comfortable darkness of aesthetic judgment. He forces us to sit in the light and acknowledge what we’ve witnessed, what we’ve been complicit in not wanting to see. The play’s “unbearable” quality isn’t a flaw—it’s the point. Theater should sometimes be unbearable. Certain truths require us to be uncomfortable witnesses.

The play Zeldin has written is almost unbearably painful to watch. But it is also precisely what theater should do: force us to see what we would prefer to ignore, bear witness to suffering we cannot fix, and recognize the human capacity for both devastating cruelty and devastating courage. “The Other Place” deserves the recognition it received in London. New York critics owe it—and Zeldin—a second look.