By the time this is published, your columnist will have seen the students of the National Theatre perform their chosen version of Antigone. The earliest of Sophocles’ Theban plays, though the climax of them in terms of subject matter, and the recapitulation of the story which begins with Oedipus Rex. The version they have chosen is the adaptation by Jean Anouilh, the author of Becket, about the bishop and the King, as well as Time Remembered and Poor Bitos. He deliberately frames the conflict between authority and the individual in terms of Nazi barbarity and the individual conscience. Antigone is the archetypical play of Hegelian dialectics in which two prerogatives clash, and it has the radiant freshness of a dramatist who was simultaneously a master who never wasted a word. You might have to be having a more than usually dim-witted day but a decades-long knowledge of the Antigone myth and Sophocles play didn’t stop me reading a long way into my friend Kamala Shamsie’s ravishing novel Home Fire before I realised it was the Antigone story being dramatised with such poignancy and power.

If contemporary poignancy and power are what you’re after, then try Dept. Q on Netflix. It’s made by Scott Frank, who was responsible for The Queen’s Gambit, and it has an extraordinary and consistently surprising sense of mystery in the midst of intimately familiar things. It’s set in Edinburgh and Matthew Goode – the only character with a standard English accent – is seconded to unearth a cold case which will act as a marvellous publicity stunt for his cynical seniors. The chosen subject is a dark-haired and arresting young barrister who may remind viewers of that legal raven, Sue Chrysanthou, though she is much younger. Chloe Pirrie is utterly starry and unknown to Goode and his colleagues, she is alive and being consistently tormented in some submarine-like cylinder where sound and air pressure can be manipulated to madden the victim.

The characters in Dept. Q are marvellously interconnected. There is the barrister’s brother, not given to speaking (in fact suffering from aphasia), who turned against her. There is their long-haired father, and there are the tormentors’ distorted voices as they rail and sneer at the lawyer. She has announced in her adversarial heyday that karma or guilt or the wrath that moves the waves will eventually come out and get the murderer or major villain.

Goode’s cop-partner is semi-paralysed and wants to die, but he is belatedly willing to help if someone will give him a laptop, and the very grammar of interconnections keeps changing like a dreamscape.

Goode lives with his stepson, who oppresses him with his music, his mad masks and his rage. They come to a deal, but then things fade and the police therapist (a superb Kelly Macdonald) – to whom our anti-hero is attracted – says the defining credo of the young is ‘f–– off and tuck me in’.

There’s also a cadet who insists on a place in the cold case team and is addicted to some version of – well, not Turkish but Middle Eastern delight.

Then, there’s the Syrian gent (Alexej Manvelov) who supplies these sweets and proves with one swift gesture, by looking at a file, that he is one of the natural-born geniuses of crime and detection. You all but gasp at the authority of his acting. It’s a bit like the moment in some Christos Tsiolkas dramatisation that suddenly makes you think there are lost legions of great ethnic actors just awaiting the dramatic opportunity.

Dept. Q is elaborately interwoven in a way that dazzles the brain while deepening the representation of the well of feeling. It achieves a remarkable balance between surprise –– just at the edge of grotesquerie and horror – only to spring back into some new configuration of a humanly proportioned shape, however surprising.

The torture of the young woman in the weird, vengeful machine and the reality of Goode failing to be impressed, at least overtly, by any inherent goodness in the world, is balanced by everyday irony, which is constantly nudging towards humour. There is also constant tension between role and personality. A very distinguished-looking character – there are a few of them – confesses to Goode that the young barrister was always snapping at his heels, wanting to get ahead of him. Then he is displeased by his own candour and says if the detective wants to see him again, he should make an appointment with the office of the Lord Advocate (clearly, he is the Chief Prosecutor). Later, we see him celebrating in a sporty shirt, his gaudiness the image of his satisfaction.

Dept. Q is one of those rare shows that has a depth and power of shadow and surprise that is breathtaking because every new touch on the string of its development is also an allegory of where this streamer is heading and how much it’s meant to be a startling but wholly credible image of what life is like, in its casualness and in extremis.

It is beautifully crafted but humanly true, which gives its brilliance an uncanniness and justifies the comparisons that have been made with Mare of Easttown. This, you feel, is where they will point to show the kind of depth as well as the gleaming yarn-spinning of the serial drama. This crime and detection streamer can be compared to the great Victorian comrade-in-arms of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, in The Moonstone and The Woman in White.

Last week we saw the death of that intensely likeable and vastly talented man, Edmund White. I remember meeting him and saying, ‘I heard you’d been sick’, and he replied, ‘Well, I’ve got AIDS, but I’m as happy as a June bug.’ He had the benefit of massively effective drugs.

I read all his books which were things of wonder and classics of realism. If you want a very classical story with no gay sex read ‘Record Time’, (collected in Chaos) about growing up highbrow in America. It’s a masterpiece.

It’s cheering that Sarah Goodes is directing a one-woman show, Amplified, about that raunchy rock star Chrissy Amphlett, a legend to everyone who saw her play live. Sarah Goodes’ 2014 production of Joanna Murray-Smith’s Switzerland was masterly. Now that play is being filmed with Helen Mirren– directed in black and white by that master stylist, Anton Corbijn.