The Other Place: an 'excruciatingly funny' and 'shockingly frank' take on Antigone

"There's a lot of Greek suffering hovering over London at the moment," said Sarah Crompton on What's on Stage. Robert Icke's new version of "Oedipus", starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, is about to open, and an "Elektra", with Brie Larson, is due in January. But both of them "will have to be exceptional to match the sheer cathartic power" of "The Other Place", a "very loose" retelling of "Antigone" that manages to be naturalistic yet also uncanny.

Writer-director Alexander Zeldin strips away the complexities of Sophocles's plot to illuminate brilliantly why a 2,500-year-old play – about a young woman who defies her uncle, with tragic consequences – still has "universal resonance".

The action unfurls not in ancient Thebes, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times, but in a modern-day suburban home, where King Creon is Chris, his niece Antigone is Annie, and her sister Ismene is Issy. Here, Antigone has no slain brother. Instead, we join the story some years after the suicide of the girls' father – and amid a family feud about the fate of his ashes. This is "Antigone" as "modern psychodrama, digging deep into the fears, desires and taboos that surge through it. The result is both surprisingly funny and shockingly frank." Emma D'Arcy as Annie and Tobias Menzies as Chris turn in "blazing" performances as two people struggling "with a grief they can't control and a past that haunts them".

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But all the cast excel, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian, in a riveting evening that generates audible gasps of shock from the audience. The "drama is huge", though the play is lean, at 80 minutes.

I'd say it's too lean, said Fiona Mountford on the i news site. In Greek tragedy, the endings bring the "purity and clarity" of catharsis. Here, too much is left unexplained. Zeldin does rather duck Sophocles's larger questions, to focus on the "foetid" relationship between Chris and Annie, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. Still, on its own terms, "this is sucker-punch theatre, beautifully detailed and at times excruciatingly funny".

Lyttelton, National Theatre, London SE1. Until 9 November