A stunning reminder of why theatre matters
The Son Duke of York’s
Idon’t often do big personal admissions in reviews, but this is one I feel I can’t avoid. When I was in my late teens I sank into a terrible (it was described as a clinical) depression, from which I couldn’t escape for months. Everything felt hopeless. The future seemed impossible. I didn’t bunk off school or self-harm; I slumped, and watched the world slip by. For me, Florian Zeller’s The Son, which details the psychological unravelling of a callow Parisian youth called Nicolas, feels eerily like staring at my younger self.
Here, the trigger for the malcontent’s breakdown is his parents’ divorce and feeling at home with neither his sorrowful (because spurned) mother nor his father, the latter’s new partner and baby (with whom he goes to live). None of that applied to me. But the numb despair, the sullen withdrawal, the inarticulate desperation, the relief followed by violent plunges back into gloom? All this rings horribly true to my life then. So I find it immensely heartening that The Son has made it into the West End. I think it’s the most emphatic and empathetic play about the terror – and potential tragedy – of depression I’ve seen since emerging from that unnerving and faintly scarring episode. For this to move from Kilburn – it premiered at the Kiln in February – into the heart of town feels like a valuable statement in itself.
We’ve come some way towards being more open about lethally negative feelings. Yet only this week, we’ve had the terrible news of the death of artist
Alison Lapper’s son Parys who, she has revealed, suffered from depression. And the play’s opening at the Duke of York’s coincides with statistics showing that last year there was a spike in male suicides in the UK, the biggest killer of men under the age of 45.
This is a 100-minute drama that stares in the face of mental anguish, and yet, for all its grimness, with occasional unexpected shafts of humour, it feels oddly life-affirming. As well as attesting to the considerable finesse of the playwright, who creates a pressure-cooker ambience and a volcanic eruption of feeling that spills like molten lava into the auditorium, Zeller’s simplicity itself is stirring.
Since The Father – the ingeniously discombobulating play about an old man’s dementia with which he announced his talent here five years ago (the film version, starring Anthony Hopkins, is now in the can) – the prolific Frenchman has shown a fascination with theatricalising mental states. But this has sometimes veered towards the tricksy, as though his cerebral stock-in-trade required clever mind games. Here, there are jolting twists, but the reversals primarily express Nicolas’s volatile condition; we’re looking in on unhappiness that has the nature of a riddle, with no easy explanation or obvious solution.
Zeller has revealed that it’s his most personal work – he was inspired by a difficult time experienced by his stepson – which explains the way this piece, for all its quality of abstraction, has a piercing, inexorable authenticity. But praise must be laid across the board: first at the feet of pin-sharp translator Christopher Hampton and director Michael Longhurst and team, who set the time-slipping action within a chic interior (upon the white walls of which Nicolas delinquently scrawls) that serves as a clinical, deceptively bright counterpoint to the nightmarish emotional chaos into which those who try to help him are drawn.
Chief laurels, though, go to Laurie Kynaston as Nicolas, often wearing his face like a Greek mask of impassivity, communicating much through brimming eyes, and a wayward, twitchy physicality. It’s a transfixing, name-making performance, supported to the hilt by, above all, Amanda Abbington as his anguished mother and John Light as the father, by turns stern and consoling, who faces his own agonising dilemma: at what point do you cede authority to the psychiatric establishment?
It might be thought that the obvious personal identification has clouded my critical judgment. Certainly, the play will resonate more with some than others, but the standing ovations tell their own story. If you’re looking for a fun time, go elsewhere. If you’re looking for a reminder of why theatre matters, this is it.
Until Nov 2. Tickets: 0844 871 7623; atgtickets.com