SOAK UP THE SON
Bask in the stellar performances of this gritty tale that fizzes with raw emotion
The Son (Kiln Theatre, London) Verdict: Devastating account of teenage depression ★★★★★ Tartuffe (Lyttelton, National Theatre, London) Verdict: Solid but toothless ★★★✩✩
PARENTS of teenagers will need to take a deep breath before seeing Florian Zeller’s new play. It’s no cake walk.
The Son is the third in a series by the French playwright that began with The Father, first seen here in 2015 with Kenneth Cranham, and The Mother, starring Gina McKee, a year later.
This one has a stunning performance by Laurie Kynaston as the son in the grip of serious depression, opposite John Light as his protective father. The play is surely the best of the trilogy, and it totally blew me away.
Kynaston’s character, Nicholas, has been bunking off school since his parents separated. More alarmingly, we discover he’s been self-harming.
While he tries to get his life back on track, he thinks he’ll be better off staying with his father, who has a new partner and a baby son.
Light’s character is a smart, ambitious Parisian lawyer who seeks to bring reason and calm to all around him. His perfect life is mirrored by the elegant white paneling of Lizzie Clachan’s staging, fitted with an expressionist painting and grand piano.
But there are also portents of imminent disorder, with a mounted stag’s head lying on the floor and a bag of junk suspended overhead.
The boy is bewildered and frustrated by his father’s belief that everything can be explained and set right.
Amanda Abbington, as his mother, watches from the side, desperate for signs of recovery. And Amaka Okafor, as his stepmother, tries to play peacemaker amid the boy’s violent mood swings.
But what anchors Michael Longhurst’s steely production is Kynaston’s extraordinary performance as the boy in the grip of unreachable depression.
He brings a raw, fragile intensity and is emotionally explosive, unable to fathom why he is so wounded. Yet he is also warm and cheeky, with a heartbreaking smile.
If Kynaston anchors the play and provides the emotional stakes, Light is a fine actor whose desperate resolve to help his son forces him to take sides against his new wife, and so tear his life in two.
It’s a performance of a lifetime, rooted in meticulous detail as Light’s self-belief is tragically reduced to rubble.
It all sounds pretty bleak, yet curiously, although it is desperately sad, it’s not a depressing show. There are always rays of light, whether it’s a moment of dancing or Zeller’s sardonic observation of petty marital squabbles.
OVERALL,
it is terribly moving, and if that is slightly overplayed by the use of Samuel Barber’s tearjerking Adagio For Strings, so be it.
An exceptional play and production, anatomising every parent’s worst nightmare.
n JOHN DONNELLY’S new version of Moliere’s Tartuffe transposes the comedy to the middle-class Valhalla of Highgate in North London.
It’s a classic yarn about a religious conman ripping off a gullible businessman, but I was unsure what was being satirised in Blanche McIntyre’s lavish revival. Actor Denis O’Hare turns the pious fraud of the title into a New Age hippy with a tricksy display of clowning in which he skates on the parquet floor with cushions, writhes on a Heals sofa and washes his derriere in an ice bucket.
But creepiness soon usurps his naughty charisma and it all begins to feel frivolous.
The casting also whitewashes multi-cultural reality. Kevin Doyle is a standard, middle-aged white male as the deluded businessman; and Lia Williams is reduced to an American trophy wife.
Kitty Archer fizzes as their daughter, and good as Geoffrey Lumb is as her histrionic poet boyfriend, couldn’t he have been a beat-boxing poet from an ethnic minority?