The Father,
Bath
Until Saturday
DEMENTIA... the word, the illness floats and hovers but is never once spoken in The Father.
And yet it is the big white elephant in the room.
It is the reason 80-year-old Andre is losing his bearings.
Set in Paris, The Father, Florian Zeller’s award-winning play is divided into little vignettes shedding light and shadow on to the life of the octogenarian and his daughter Anne.
As curtain rises he has driven yet another well-meaning carer to quit, and Anne is at her wits’ end. She announces she is moving to London. Or is she?
A few scenes later, Andre is apparently living with his daughter and her husband Pierre or is she divorced and living with a new man?
Information, faces, time are all slipping away from him.
Each event is seen through the eyes of a man losing himself and increasingly frightened of his surroundings; and as he scrabbles to piece snatches of conversation and confused memories into a coherent whole, so are we the spectators. But like Andre any hint of truth or logic soon falls away.
Can we trust a man’s version of reality when he is ever more disconnected from the world around him?
The sparse set and dissonant musical interludes between scenes - like a skipping record - all contribute to the atmosphere of uncertainty. We simply cannot trust what we see or hear. Even when Andre is absent, Anne and Pierre draw us in only to spit us out questioning what we just witnessed.
The use of unidentified actors to occasionally play Anne and Pierre is a poignant touch bringing into sharp focus Andre’s illness and inability to recognise those closest to him. They are in his mind complete strangers.
Claire Skinner is simply stellar as Andre’s devoted daughter, always putting her father’s needs first despite his demands, flights of fancy and unprovoked outbursts. Torn between visceral love for her father and growing hatred at his illness she navigates the ups and downs with grace.
The leading light of the show is undeniably Kenneth Cranham whose portrayal of Andre’s mental collapse and inner struggle is remarkably nuanced and harrowing.
Reduced to a childlike state, fearful and forsaken by his own mind, his despair and jumble of emotions is deeply moving and reduced me and many others in the audience to tears – a rare occurrence in my experience.
Raw and brutally honest, it is a magnificent and important piece of theatre. -Marion Sauvebois
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