My friend John O’Brien, a distinguished reviewer of plays these days, went to see it and reports below:-
The Father is a disturbing, disorienting and utterly compelling portrayal of Dementia. In one room and in 90 minutes of intense psychological drama we are immersed in the decline of Andre (Kenneth Cranham) a 70ish retired engineer as he slowly but inexorably loses the battle against Dementia. The play is disturbing on a number of levels. Firstly the hopelessness of everyone in the face of Dementia. But also what the illness does to everyone around Andre. His daughter Anne (Amanda Drew) despite all her best intentions is utterly baffled and bewildered by the situation. She is hopelessly torn between her role as loving daughter and her commitment to her Pierre (Daniel Flynn) “The Man I love”, but she is on a hiding to nothing. These two roles cannot be reconciled, this is shown wonderfully in a scene where she sits at the dinner table with her father and husband either side of her, she is stuck in the middle trying to hold everything together but in the end just leaves the room, broken. An even darker side to the dementia dilemma is revealed in the scenes between the two son in laws, Pierre & Man (Brian Doherty) and Andre. Exasperated by Andre’s behaviour, he has driven Anne to the edge especially in his repeated refrain that he much prefers his other daughter Elise, they both speak the same menacing words to him “how long are you going to hang around getting on everyone’s tits?” It gets even more disturbing when Man gives Andre several sharp slaps in the face with the threat of a beating in future.
So a very disturbing play full of Pinteresque menace. Intriguingly in the context of Andre’s decline into oblivion both Pinter and Beckett make perfect sense. Not knowing how or where you are or what time it is are “normal” for Andre. He asks Pierre what he is doing in his flat, a scene straight out of The Caretaker and Pierre replies “You are in my flat”. Or echoing Beckett’S lost character’s, Andre asks bewildered “who am I?”. Andre loses his battle to stay in control and ends up in a nursing home in a whitewashed room with just a bed, defeated, he cries like a child that he wants “his Mummy”. It is an utterly tragic end and one that all of us potentially face. No play could be more appropriate or timely.
Miriam Buether has put together a wonderful set framed I thought by three paintings. The first, David Hockney’s 70s interior showing a middle aged couple in their flat. This scene provides the setting for the 90 minutes traffic of our stage. Subtly items are subtracted from the room stealthily so that Andre ends up in that whitewashed bare room with only a bed. The second painting is Mark Rothko and this is brilliantly incorporated into the scene breaks as the glass frontage framing the set goes black with white LED lights framing the perimeter of the rectangular set. This is clearly an echo of Rothko’s Buddhists TV sets canvases in Tate Modern. It works so well because that’s as good as any visual image we are likely to get for the bewildered internal life of a dementia sufferer. And the third painting is of course Munch’s The Scream As Andre cries for his Mummy mouth wide open.
Each scene change is marked by the Rothko’s painting and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach’s fugue but as Andre’s condition worsens so Bach’s fugue is disrupted and broken by Schoenberg like tonal dissonance, it is a brilliant piece of sound engineering created by Christopher Shutt.
I left the Theatre shattered and shaken up, rightly so. The Theatre exists to give us a cold shower now and again and force us to face the tragedy of the human condition.
I can’t recommend this play enough.
