Antigone, written nearly two and a half millennia ago, is a political play about power. It’s also about family issues, tensions and conflicts of loyalty. You’d be hard put to find anything more searingly, timelessly topical especially in the hands of playwright/poet Inua Ellams. It took a few minutes to find its feet on press night but thereafter was pretty riveting.

Antigone (Zainab Hasan) is part of a 21 Century British Pakistani Muslim family whose uncle, Creon (Tony Jayawardena) becomes Prime Minister early in the play. A shootout leads to the death of Antigone’s police officer brother, Eteocles (Abe Jarman), a state of emergency declared and the body of the executed Polyneices (Nadeem Islam) detained indefinitely – a dreadful fate for a Muslim for whom burial rituals are crucial. Creon meanwhile, every inch a right wing Tory politician immaculately observed by Jayawardena, insists repeatedly that the law (which he has changed, of course) must come first. That means that no imam will bury Polyneices or be seen to sympathise with an extremist, however much Antigone pleads with her uncle. Of course neither Sophocles nor Ellams gives us a happy ending. As some wag behind me remarked at the end in rich Estuary “It’s Greek drama innit?”

Ellams’s language is richly poetic although most of the dialogue is in prose. I really liked Antigone’s opening speech – full of passionate rhetoric –  when she’s trying to prevent the closure of the youth centre she’s been helping to run and the moving poem Ellams gives her at the opening of Act 2 when she’s in prison. Hasan is splendid in this role. Her everyday London accent is very natural and she is totally convincing as a feisty young woman with passions, determination, love for her cousin, Haemon (Oliver Johnstone – good) and a powerful sense of right and wrong.

But the real star of this show is the chorus. What do you do with a Greek Chorus in a 21 Century play? Ellams repeatedly reworks them as young people in the youth centre, a posse of paparazzi, feminist groups, street demonstrators and much more. They rhythmically spit out angry, thoughtful or apposite words (often in iambic pentameter) and are spikily choreographed by Carrie-Anne Ingrouille to Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante’s arrestingly dramatic music. It provides slick and very engrossing backbone to this interesting, gripping version of the play.

Welcome too is the casting of Islam as Polyneices. He is deaf and signs as he speaks as do some other cast members while he’s on stage. It’s a pleasing performance and adds yet another dimension to the drama – as well as making a fine production more accessible.