[It seems the Dominion Post is not going to review The Father, as such, but this preview (9 October) verges into review territory …]

Until now, I’ve never been able to comprehend what my mother went through a decade ago as her grey-blue eyes flickered with fear. We asked her all the time, “Do you remember?”, trying desperately to jog her memory.  

A day after Mum’s 72nd birthday, which she spent in a Napier rest home, I watched a Circa Theatre dress rehearsal of Florian Zeller’s play, The Father.

One of the most powerful pieces of theatre I have ever seen – a point backed up by its director Ross Jolly, who has staged more than 80 plays – I walked away wishing I could say two words to Mum: “I’m sorry.” [More] 

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The first thing to say is don’t be put off by the subject matter. The Father reminds us that comedy comes from an amalgam of truth and pain. Not that we’re talking commedia slapstick here. More comedy-of-anguish, perhaps. And absurdism? Partly, perhaps, but the old genre labels are insufficient. The French novelist and playwright Florian Zeller* is breaking the moulds, recasting the die … Or maybe he’s just playing, in his playmaker’s quest to capture the elusive ‘reality’ of dementia.

To my knowledge Australia’s Geoffrey Atherton was the first to discover the comic potential of selective memory loss and familial interdependence, with his hit ABC TV sitcom Mother and Son. Starring Ruth Cracknell and Garry McDonald, and securely located in ‘comedy-of-anguish’ territory, it ran for six seasons (42 eps) from 1982-92.

Zeller’s The Father (translated by Christopher Hampton)is more intangible. Rather than offer an objective ‘fly on the wall’ observation of the relationship between father and daughter – and the daughter’s partner, the father’s home carer and other interlopers (for want of a better word) – it seeks to capture the subjective experience of … And here’s the thing: as the play unfolds it’s hard to tell. But by the end you may deduce a logical rationale for the non-linear time mix, repetitions, different bodies claiming same names, the changing internal and external landscapes …

The set, designed by John Hodgkins, is also active in manifesting the unnerving loss of logic; there is much more to it than initially meets the eye. Stage manager Eric Gardiner, and presumably all the available actors backstage, conspire to produce uncanny changes to furnishings, pictures, curtains, the contents of a bookshelf … (It’s a much more subtle ‘performing set’ than the dysfunctional one in the The Play That Goes Wrong a couple of weeks ago.) This adds significantly to our own experience of increasing discombobulation, and the equal and opposite growth of our comprehension of what it’s like to lose hold of reason.  

That said, human empathy remains the most engaging component as director Ross Jolly’s cast of six inexorably draw us into their subjective realities. Or is it just one person’s ‘reality’? Whichever way you look at it, it’s impossible not to recognise and relate to each moment of truth despite the uncertainty of its foundation.

As André, the titular father, Jeffrey Thomas compels our compassion. His mellifluous voice and attractive charm win us over every time, no matter how hurtfully insensitive and abusively paranoid he had just been. Disempowerment and loneliness are also human conditions everyone experiences to some degree; how can we not weep for all he is losing, including his own sense of judgement?

His daughter Anne is in the unenviable position of trying to understand and manage his condition while getting her own life back on track, post-divorce and in the throes of building a relatively new (or is it?) relationship, with Pierre. As the proverbial ‘paté-in-the-baguette’ between Andr and Pierre (both crusty yet soft), Danielle Mason navigates Anne’s journey with a magnetic subtlety that commands our empathy, not least when dealing with her father’s love of the unseen sister, Elise.

That Gavin Rutherford’s Pierre is disconcertingly hard to pin down is exactly as it should be. Love, frustration, anger and abusiveness are all strongly realised, leaving us to decide what exactly has actually happened.

The home help, Laura, comes with no baggage (until André gives her some), so appears at first blush to be a ‘what you see is what you get’ character. Harriet Prebble ensures she’s a ‘breath of fresh air’ and very much her ‘own person’, even if she has passed through the prism of a pixilating brain (depending on how you choose to decode it all in the end).

Credited in the programme as Man and Woman, Simon Leary and Bronwyn Turei punctuate proceedings in various surprising ways, then resolve into roles that refresh our understanding of where things are at, and all that has gone before. Their belief in each performance moment compels us to believe them too, even when we cannot quite make sense of it all.

“For me,” writes Zeller in a programme note, “theatre is above all the place for questions and not for answers. For doubt, more than certainty and conviction.” This is especially valid in the dramatisation of a life where certainty and conviction are inexorably eroding; where even the simplest existential questions that haunt us all are finally unanswerable.

The costumes, designed by Sheila Horton, are touchstones to a real world we recognise. Likewise Marcus McShane’s lighting serves an objective view of reality. It is the sound design, by Ross Jolly and Callum Scott, that reflects the disintegration of André’s world and the ripple effects on Anne’s world and beyond.

Not so much a ‘who dunnit?’ as a tragi-comic ‘what’s actually happening?’ mystery, The Father allows us to experience an unravelling of reality in ways that touch us all. You won’t be sorry you’ve seen it.
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*In his recent review of The Truth, the Guardian’s Michael Billington observes Zeller has “a palpable love of symmetry”. This is because after writing La Mère / The Mother (2010), he wrote Le Père / The Father (2012); after writing La Vérité / The Truth (2011), he wrote Le Mensonge / The Lie (2014). 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer