THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
It's not every day that an internationally renowned playwright will choose to have the world premiere of his new play presented in another country in another language, but this is what Florian Zeller has done, bestowing his latest on the Hampstead Theatre. It's an acknowledgment of his love of London theater where seven of his plays have had great success over the past decade, and of his admiration for his translator, acclaimed British playwright Christopher Hampton, who's translated all seven. Just less than a year ago both of them won Oscars (as did Sir Anthony Hopkins) for the film version of Zeller's play The Father, itself a hit in the West End.
This modern story plows a particularly Freudian furrow. Inspired by a fairy tale about a King who pursues a beautiful stag into a dark forest only to find himself lost, it explores a character being punished for following his desires. The protagonist here, played by Toby Stephens, is a respectable surgeon with a loving wife (Gina McKee), who lives a comfortably bourgeois existence, but there's a mistress (Angel Coulby) in tow and she says she wants more. We're in familiar territory (think Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors) where a rich man, pestered by a younger lover after the affair has soured, battles with his homicidal urges towards her. It's the fantasy of every straying husband seeking repentance: how to end it cleanly and resume with the wife as if nothing had happened.
A lover of fractured narratives, Zeller's narrative here is anything but linear. He presents us with alternative versions of the same scenes leaving us to try and reconstruct the 'facts' as if we're assembling a jigsaw. The main character is also performed by different actors in different scenes. so, we have Man 2 (Paul McGann) and a menacing Man in Black, played by Finbar Lynch, looking like the Joker, in white-face. Is one of these the man of action who would carry out the deed, one the thinker/procrastinator and one, perhaps, the conscience? All seem to comprise distinct aspects of the same man.
Crucial to the impact of the piece is Anna Fleischle's grand, exquisitely dressed, realistic sets. A luxurious living room (serious Parisian parquet on display), a bedroom and an office coexist on the stage, at first totally compartmentalized, but as the play progresses, and aided by Hugh Vanstone's gorgeously delicate lighting changes, we get impressions of overflow or a blending of worlds, just as the Man's world crashes inwards. It's a hyper-realistic presentation of a play that is totally impressionistic.
Jonathan Kent's subtle direction of this challenging piece is always compelling but even a cast as stellar and experienced as this one really struggles to make us care enough about these characters. Stephens lends gravitas to the tormented protagonist, but the female characters are under-written and one dimensional, with McKee, in particular, wasted as the Wife. The fractured narrative, and all in just 90 minutes, doesn't really allow time for it to gain enough purchase on our emotions. The actors have, after all, that most difficult of tasks, repeating over and over the same scene with a slight alteration.
The heart of this got lost in the stylistic experiment.
