Dignity and grace from two giants of the stage
The Height of the Storm Wyndham’s
Arguably the most successful French playwright on the London stage since Jean Anouilh, Florian Zeller, 39, is fascinated as an artist with our fragile grasp on reality, above all the tendency of the mind to play tricks on us, to let us down – and the way that can make us laugh and drive us to tears.
His playful, philosophical dramas offer guessing-games that push audiences to distraction. Cosy bourgeois milieux become minefields of cerebral coups de théâtre. What captivated him about the medium – and lured him away from (acclaimed) novel-writing – is, he has said, “the way it sidesteps rationality”.
If you loved The Father – which earned rave reviews at the Wyndham’s in 2015 (and won its star Kenneth Cranham an Olivier award) – then the chances are you’ll be smitten with The Height of the Storm, which (aside from being translated again by Christopher Hampton) shares points of contact with that ingenious vision of an old man suffering from dementia.
We first encounter Jonathan Pryce’s elderly Andre staring out of a kitchen window (a magnificent set from Anthony Ward in Jonathan Kent’s monumental yet minutiae-alert production). He’s so lost in thought he’s almost absent, as his daughter Anne (Amanda Drew) discusses “a change of circumstance”, and a possible visit from the estate agent. When he speaks he doesn’t make sense; is he afflicted by dementia, or grief? His wife, Madeleine, isn’t around.
But suddenly, here she is in the grey-haired, bird-like form of Eileen Atkins, and the tables are turned; the family (completed by a second daughter, Anna Madeley’s Elise) are coping with sorting the papers of this eminent writer – they’re talking about him in the past tense. Yet the couple convene to chat as she peels mushrooms – though she talks as if she has departed. Who sent flowers? And what does the accompanying card say?
On and on it goes, drawing us into a vortex of uncertainty, so that Pryce’s perturbing outbursts of frustration might express our own confusion. We glimpse as if by lightning, the metaphorical grande idée that when an inseparable couple are divided by death, or debilitating illness, it’s as if they’re equally afflicted. The lead performances have the force of thunder-claps – nuanced, lived-in, finally full of poignant dignity and child-like grace.
Yet in testing his audience’s wits and patience – with (to borrow Churchill’s line) “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” – Zeller’s machinations are intrusively apparent. You glean the truth of the human condition, but the artistry around it is so elaborate it verges on feeling false. It’s a case of being left in two minds, then – which is perhaps exactly as Monsieur Zeller would want it.
Until Dec 1. Tickets: 0844 482 5120; theheightofthestorm.com