Zeller’s devastating depiction of divorce is his best work yet
The Son Kiln, London NW6
Aplaywright since 2004 – in the first instance a prize-winning novelist – Frenchman Florian Zeller’s exceptional (and prolific) theatrical talent was only announced in the UK a decade later, with the premiere here of The Father. A hugely affecting portrait of an elderly man suffering dementia that besieged the audience with much artful disorientation to draw them into his bewildered condition, it moved from Bath via the Tricycle (now Kiln) to the West End, where it met with such acclaim it returned in 2016.
We’ve seen a significant tranche of Zeller’s oeuvre since 2014, primarily in London (and thanks, each time, to Christopher Hampton as translator). Last autumn he enjoyed another West End success with The Height of the
Storm, again a consciously puzzling end of life study that depicts an elderly married couple who are eerily together yet dismayingly bereft. While I found it too tricksy for its own good, there was no denying the elegiac richness of the performances (from Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins) or the value of Zeller’s repeated, forensic fascination with family relations, fragile mental states and the nature of existence itself.
To my mind, The Son is every bit the equal of The Father and, eschewing the riddling quality found in earlier works, in some ways it even eclipses it; the surgical precision of the writing achieves a devastating visceral impact. Committed Zeller-ites will note that as with the former play and The Mother
(also seen at the Tricycle), it shares the principal character names, suggesting that he’s revisiting the same family. Whether that holds up or not, there’s no need to come into the theatre with anything other than your own experience.
The scenario is simple, highly recognisable and all the more chilling for that – because this is a play about a promising teenager with his whole life ahead of him yet who wants none of it – “I can’t seem to understand the point of it… [of ] anything… life,” sighs the 18-year-old malcontent, Nicolas (Laurie Kynaston).
Bright, sensitive and fast withdrawing into depression, the youth’s overwhelming existential angst has apparently been caused by his parents’ divorce. It has left him alienated from his mother (Amanda Abbington’s Anne) and seeking refuge at the apartment of his father (John Light’s Pierre). But here, amid his father’s new partner (Amaka Okafor’s Sofia) and their baby, he feels like a spare part. What starts off on a near-comic footing, with the pair guiltily trying to make him feel at home, to be met with sulky, quasi tactical despondency moves inexorably towards a place of desolation as truancy and acts of self-harm prompt a resentmentstirring regime of tough love culminating in psychiatric care.
The décor in Michael Longhurst’s immaculately presented production is all stylish, chic minimalism – with glaring hints of pampering material affluence. Into this des res milieu (designer Lizzie Clachan) Kynaston’s scruffy youth erupts, with a bin-bag load of strewn stuff and a tendency to scribble on the clinically white, high panelled walls. The 25-year-old actor registers all the ambiguities and complexities of the part, by turns brooding, vengefully impassive, irritating, spoilt, achingly vulnerable and heart-rendingly desperate. He’s matched every step of the way by Light as his career-focused father – carrying his own filial psychological baggage, riven as to what the best form of rescue is and driven spare by the engulfing turmoil.