‘Through this play, we can really touch people’
MARIUS WEYERS (pictured) had never heard of Florian Zeller’s The Father before Fugard Theatre executive director, Daniel Galloway, sent him the script, offering him the eponymous role.
“I read the script and e-mailed him back immediately and said I haven’t laughed and cried so much for a long time,” Weyers remembers.
“There was just no way of not doing it. It was a lovely play and a wonderful part. It’s a frightening part which I realise now, every day,” he continued with a slight frown.
He (and fellow cast members Anthea Thompson, Emily Child, Brent Palmer, Nicholas Paul and Amy Louise Wilson) have been rehearsing at The Fugard Theatre under director Greg Karvellas (Clybourne Park, Bad Jews) for three weeks now.
“I’m having a ball with him. It was the same with (Christiaan Olwagen’s) Seemeeu and Virginia Woolf. To work with a young director, a really young director… They have different ways of doing things, approaching things. I find that exciting.
“He’s got interesting ideas, but he also allows the freedom. If you don’t agree with him then you talk about it and try something else, which is lovely. He’s got strong ideas, but he’s not authoritarian,” said Weyers about Karvellas.
However, rehearsals are emotionally taxing. The play is a peek inside the mind of Andre, who is living with his daughter and son-in-law, and in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease.
Weyers points out that the play has not been written in a chronological order, so the audience can get a sense of how Andre drifts in and out of reality: “There is nothing linear about it, which in a way is difficult, but it also gives us a freedom because you’re not bound to a sense of: ‘He’s at this stage now, so you have to do this.’ It’s up and down.”
“As I said to my wife after the first week of rehearsal, I should have decided from now on to do small parts in light comedies because it’s a very emotional part.” He all but rolls his eyes.
The first time he read the script, Weyers could empathise with the character and immediately saw the lighter side of the dialogue. But, he didn’t know much about Alzheimer’s disease, so he began doing research by talking to friends whose loved ones had been touched by the disease of progressive mental deterioration.
“Suddenly the awfulness of this illness dawned on me. With Alzheimer’s you lose your loved one in life. It is a gradual losing of a loved one, which is terrifying,” he said.
The 71-year-old actor has been reading books and watching documentaries about Alzheimer’s, and is leaning toward the idea that he would prefer a mercy killing if it ever happened to him. But, even knowing what he now knows, he would leap at the chance to play the Andre character again. “The writer calls the play a ‘tragic farce’ and it’s about that basic thing in human beings – that under very difficult and awful circumstances, people can be funny when they are not even trying to be… the human condition is sometimes too ridiculous.
“It affects one and through doing this play, we can really touch people.”
Weyers says the relationships his character has with the various people in his life tells the story, but The Father is intense so “thank God for the humour”. ●
Translated from the French by Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller’s The Father runs at The Fugard Theatre from November 8 to December 3. The Fugard will mount Zeller’s companion piece, The Mother, in February next year with Janice Honeyman directing Anna-Mart van der Merwe in the title role.