Hit play The Father comes to the West End's Duke of York's for a strictly limited 5 week run ahead of a national tour.
Honoured with France's most prestigious theatre gong, the 2014 Moliere award for Best Play, and lauded with a flurry of four and five star reviews at its English premiere, The Father impressed at the Tricycle Theatre so much it earned a West End transfer. It isn't hard to see why. It's just so clever; dementia has been written about before, but never from the experience of the sufferer. It's also devastating; people weren't just sniffing - by the final scene, the audience was sobbing. Some had to be helped out of the auditorium.
A searing play about dementia
The heart-wrenching loss of lucidity in old age is played out as the 80-year-old protagonist André tries to piece together his past. Was he a tap dancer or an engineer? Where is his daughter? The only certainty is that André is still dressed in pyjamas and cannot find his watch.
There are echoes of Shakespeare's King Lear as the titular father's relationship with his daughter becomes mediated by madness, but the audience share in this loss of control, as different actors play the same parts and any single thread of narrative is fractured. Christopher Hampton's terse translation maintains the understated, unsettlingly dark humour of the French script and director James McDonald's production imbues the taunting trickery of memories by repeating but shifting the same musical interlude.
Actor Kenneth Cranham
With a weighty career on stage (The Cherry Orchard, National Theatre; The Birthday Party, West End) and screen (Oliver) Kenneth Cranham has found his career-defining role in André. Switching from shuffling confusion to ferocious fear, he captures the pathos while still exuding charm and warmth.
Florian Zeller: écrivain
The arrestingly honest portrait of old age is made more surprising when you consider that playwright Florian Zeller is only 35. Like Eliot's Prufrock and the recent run of Barney Norris' Visitors (Bush Theatre), the sense of a young man envisioning old age acts to universalise the powerlessness of dementia, implicating even the youngest audience members in this possible future.
Despite popularity in Germany and a starry status in his native France, the playwright and novelist remains relatively unknown in England. As it returns to the West End due to popular demand Le Père /The Father, his first play to be performed here, has already set about changing this.
| What | The Father, Duke of York's Theatre |
| Where | Duke of York's Theatre, 104 St Martin's Lane, WC2N 4BG | MAP |
| Nearest tube | Leicester Square (underground) |
| When |
24 Feb 16 – 26 Mar 16, 7:30 PM – 10:00 PM |
| Price | £20 - £49.50 |
| Website | Click here to book via London Theatres |
