Beware: it’s easy to get lost in this dark and twisted Forest
The Forest (Hampstead Theatre, London)
Verdict: Chillingly weird ★★★★✩
The Chairs (Almeida Theatre, London)
Verdict: Sit and marvel ★★★✩✩
FLORIAN ZELLER’S plays are many things — but easy to understand is not one of them. The Forest, the latest offering from the French author of dementia drama The Father, which became an awardwinning film starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman, is no exception.
Making its world premiere in Hampstead this week, it stars Toby Stephens, Paul McGann and Gina McKee in a story about a respected Parisian surgeon concealing a tawdry affair with a younger woman (Angel Coulby).
Featuring elements of film noir, it’s an emotional and psychological labyrinth, but one without a centre, or an exit.
The surgeon, who is played by both Stephens and McGann (confused? just you wait), is a man who is slowly, painfully cracking up.
When his marriage to his steely, soignée wife (McKee) comes under threat, he makes a shocking decision that only leads him deeper into the circles of hell.
Cue the entry of the Man In Black, a white-faced Finbar Lynch as a Nosferatu-like conscience and infernal investigator, who’s on a mission to haunt him.
Scenes artfully repeat each other — with tiny twists — in a plot that cunningly avoids finding a single path through a play that leads the surgeon into a forest of darkening shame and punishment.
The temptation is to join the man in attempting to solve the riddle of his experience, but the reality is that there is no solution.
It’s an indecipherable nightmare in which it’s better to just let go . . . and submerge.
The sexual politics is somewhat dated, involving the French obsession with a femme fatale going off the rails, and taking her man with her.
And there is also the cliche of Eastern European gangsters stepping in to clear up the mess — for a price.
But Jonathan Kent’s production is never less than horribly watchable. Nor could I take my eyes off designer Anna Fleischle’s elegantly stylish set. We have the surgeon’s swanky apartment with parquet floors and dark, teal-coloured walls. A deliberately tasteless painting on the back wall echoes the seedy love nest hovering above; while, to the side, we have the spartan consulting room where our anti-hero surgeon attempts to elude his demons during his day job.
A closing tableau, tying together all Zeller’s plot strands, is a little obvious. Until then, though, this is a poisonously accomplished and chillingly weird piece of work.
■ NO LESS inscrutable, but much lighter in tone, a new production of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs at the Almeida offers a masterclass in clowning from two of the finest living exponents of that oftmaligned art: Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni (with support from Toby Sedgwick). The play is Ionesco’s 1952 classic of absurdist theatre, in which an ageing couple play host to a party of invisible guests, each of whom is supplied with a chair to sit on . . . until the stage becomes so full that there’s no room left for the actors. Magni and Hunter — who are a married couple in real life — are two of the original members of Simon McBurney’s revered Complicité theatre company. They came to fame in the 1980s, and few can match their skill at movement and physical comedy. So it goes here, with mimed routines including swapping around a real and an imaginary tea cup.
BUT what makes the performance of these two actors, who know each other so well, particularly endearing is the warmth of their relationship.
Magni wears a Chaplinesque suit and sports a tuft of white hair in the clear sky of his bald pate.
Hunter, in a black pinafore dress, croons over him and lauds his ego, warming him with girlish smiles and fondly calling him ‘crumpet’.
They bring a nonsensical world to cheerful life, while Sedgwick hands out props as the story builds in a green and orange circus tent with a revolving middle.
At nearly two hours, it’s long — and will no doubt be best appreciated by theatrical aficionados. But as a homage to an antique comedy, performed by two fine antique actors, it’s a treasure.