Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A few years ago, the UK’s National Theatre staged an exceptionally moving Christmas show. Among the characters were a pregnant woman and her partner, searching for a place to rest. So far, so seasonal. But Love, by Alexander Zeldin, wasn’t set in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago — it took place in a temporary accommodation hostel in modern Britain.One of three plays — The Inequalities trilogy — focusing on those sorely affected by austerity, the government’s programme for cutting public spending in the 2010s, Love used painstaking naturalism to envelop the audience in the world of the drama. Key to it were the quiet dignity and compassion Zeldin accorded his characters. The ending, in which a middle-aged man tenderly washed his elderly mother’s hair in the communal kitchen sink, would have made a concrete slab weep. Now Zeldin is back at the National Theatre with a very different project — at least on the surface of it. The Other Place comes with the subtitle After Antigone, so you might expect an updating of Sophocles’s great tragedy. But Zeldin, 39, has barely arrived in a small room in the theatre before he’s emphasising that that is not the case: there’s no Theban princess — or modern equivalent — facing down her royal uncle over the burial of her disgraced brother. Instead, he has gone back to what he feels is the engine of the original and reworked it in a contemporary domestic setting.“Antigone is a play about the aftermath,” he says. “It’s not about someone resisting arrest or something: it’s [about] two forms of grief.” In his version, a man who was left looking after his two nieces following his brother’s suicide has, 10 years later, decided to remodel the house, move his new wife and child in and scatter his brother’s ashes — thereby going back on his promise to his niece, Annie. That and Annie’s fragile state prompt a family crisis. “So it’s a modern tragedy around one person wanting to erase the past and one person wanting to preserve it,” says the playwright. “We have radically different ways of dealing with grief.”Zeldin is not the only writer and director grappling with Sophocles this winter. London is about to embrace two high-profile productions of Oedipus, one staged by Robert Icke, one by Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter, while Hollywood star Brie Larson will play Elektra in January. For Zeldin, the tragedian throws down a gauntlet to a modern writer. “The challenge of a contemporary tragedy is really exciting for a playwright,” he says. “Antigone takes place in less than 24 hours: it’s one action, one place. It’s a real test to write something that has the mechanism of inevitability . . . There are situations in life when there is no resolution possible and acknowledging that has a great value.”Zeldin, a warm, friendly presence, looks tired but wired after the week’s rehearsals. He leans across the table, intent on clarity, bringing the same restless honesty to the conversation as he does to his work. His new play is funny, he says — “I like laughing a lot in theatre” — but it is also an attempt to face up to difficult questions without flinching.Is theatre something that can get into the marrow of our world and make stories out of it?“At the centre of the play is somebody who has been in crisis for a long time,” he says. “The question that is central to it, and to our time, is: what to do in the face of the suffering of others? Because we know about suffering everywhere. It’s very hard to live with. But that’s where theatre has a space. It can bring us into something that we don’t normally see and that’s essential to live — to really live.”His 2023 play The Confessions turned that eye on his own family, inspired by the experiences of his Australian mother and her generation. But it also touched on Zeldin’s own childhood trauma: he lost his father, a Russian-Jewish refugee, when he was 15. In essence, it was that tragedy that propelled him towards theatre.“When someone dies you want to live,” he says. “So I lived hard. I had a bit of a rough time as a teenager. Theatre for me was a space where it was possible to say anything. And it still is . . . That’s the purpose of art — to make the unsayable sayable. And inside that it’s an act of kindness, it’s a moral act. We need it.” Still in his teens, he took a production to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it received the accolade of “worst play of the year” from one critic. “It was a real badge of honour,” he grins. But where many might have slunk off, defeated, Zeldin was hooked. He knew he had found something in which he really believed. “I realised theatre was a way of cutting through the bullshit and getting at what is essential.”That urge to bottle truth came out in his Inequalities trilogy, which he began working on in his mid-twenties. His own time doing temp jobs left him determined to find a way to honour onstage the experiences of people often ignored. The first of that trilogy, Beyond Caring, focused on factory cleaners on zero-hours contracts.“The question was whether you can carve a story out of just life,” he says. “Is theatre something that can get into the marrow of our world and make stories out of it? I’m interested in empathy. I’m interested in dignity.”After university, Zeldin travelled extensively, seeking out different ways of making theatre. He worked with the great director Peter Brook in Paris, where he still lives (though he’s considering moving back to the UK), and in 2019 set up the A Zeldin company, partly with the intention of touring. An outward looking theatre culture is “very valuable” he suggests. Fourteen years after falling in love with the stage, he remains besotted. But, in a sense, it’s a tough love. “I always ask myself the question, why theatre? What do people need to see? What’s useful?” he says. “I remember hearing a Greek director say, ‘I want this play to travel in you.’ I love that.”September 27-November 9, nationaltheatre.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
