REVIEW: The Father: Theatre Royal

The Father

Florian Zeller

Theatre Royal, Brighton.

Now eighty years old, Andre was once a tap dancer. He lives with his daughter Anne and her husband Antoine. Or was he an engineer whose daughter Anne lives in London with her new lover, Pierre? The thing is, he is still wearing his pajamas and he can’t find his watch. He is starting to wonder if he’s losing control…

The Father is the winner of France’s highest theatrical honour, the 2014 Moliere Award for Best Play, and Christopher Hampton’s crisp translation, has dazzled audiences and critics alike.

The play is a disoriented, staccato, repetitive, revisionist, confusing and deliberately undermining exercise in the struggle to maintain dignity. This serves to shift the understanding of the audience that the narrative will make some kind of sense, here- as in the illness- it shifts and turns, doors open, people change faces, roles, identities, suspicion and confusion rule, and reality itself seems to meld and fold until every time you open your eyes it’s something new, confusing and ultimately distressing.

This is strong theatre, Kenneth Cranham shows why he wins such awards and his is a bountiful, rich, noble and ultimately tender portrait of Andre’s end of life. It’s acted with panache and careful casting has given the actors chemistry, and a play about the intimacies of memories and family and the intersection of identity, place and being is always going to hinge on how the actors work together. There are harsh moments, the ever increasing paranoia when the confusion jars and slowly it dawns on the audience that there is no happy ending here, just a slow fading out of everything. It’s peppered with laughter, both hard and silly and that keeps the narrative tension bobbing along even when the facts are in freefall.

The full house loved it, and for good reason, the acting is superb. My companion and I, discussing it quietly as we left with the contemplative theater crowds felt it was missing some essential heart, a certain softness at its core where the care, love and compassion should have been, but perhaps with the focus of the play on the fathers decent into his dislocation and confusion this seeming lack of compassion was by design. This is the only translation of Florian Zeller’s work, which is an odd comment on the Anglo-centric British theatre commissioners and it would be good to see more of his work explored with such creative and innovative style.

There’s no interval; it’s ninety five minutes long. The staging and soundscape add to the relentless erosion of the person, with both becoming mere echoes of what we remember, broken snatched Bach partitas crumble into notes which nag the memory to be left in peace. The effective motive of slowly removing things from the stage, until all that was left was the bed in a huge white bare room was ruthless. Then the panic rises and consumed all even the grasped at clarity of what is and was lost. Recommend for those who like their theatre with some substance and enjoy a tour de force of acting.