Late September 2019
Many
of the great playwrights have gone back to the same well of style, theme and
exploration for the better part of their careers, and perhaps none more so than
the ones who've dealt with absurdity, surrealism and abstraction. And of course
one's reaction to that, even acknowledging the imprimatur of greatness, has to
be personal. So, full disclosure: If the production is top-notch, I can usually
climb on board for Pinter, Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello.
But I'm not feeling it for French
dramatist Florian Zeller (adapted
into English, as always, by British dramatist Christopher Hampton). Or at least, I'm not feeling it across the oeuvre.
And I think that's because, for me, he keeps writing the same play. And that's
a little different than exploring the same techniques. Perhaps a lot different.
His stock in trade is shifting
reality within families. It was bracing and moving in The Father, where each scene took us deeper into its title character's
dementia, and our perception was his. In The
Mother, it was mostly off-putting, as the main character there seemed to be putting distance
between herself and her husband, and whether or not he was having an affair
seemed almost secondary to whether or not she was projecting a narrative on top
of her apparent hostility and Oedipal attachment to her grown son.
Now we have The Height of the Storm, in which reality keeps shifting for
everybody in its featured family, the elderly married couple, Andeé (Jonathan Pryce) and Madeleine (Eileen Atkins), and their two grown
daughters: the eldest and designated caretaker Anne (Amanda Drew) and the engaged one who pops around and doesn't share
the burdens as much, Élise (Lisa O'Hare).
At any given time, one or the other of the parents may be presumed to be dead,
even if just before (or just after), there has been (or will be) a discussion
about selling the house and putting André into an assisted-living facility, or an assumption that the house and
André's occupancy will be maintained. Or which daughter is at hand, if it isn't
both, and etc. Only André has periodic moments of disorientation. For the rest
of the characters and time, when a portion of reality shifts, they shift with
it, as if alternate universes are crossing paths and they've glided from one to
the next.
Weirdly, I didn't think it was that
hard to parse the game. Zeller has presented a married couple at the end of
their lives, added their two grown daughters, and posited all the usual
scenarios such a quartet would be dealing with—and moves through all of them
with seeming randomness. So on the one hand, he manages to deliver most of the
universal, circumstantial touchpoints of audience identification. On the other
hand, because all these familiar scenarios rate equal representation in the
scheme, none of them can be dramatized in depth. Which basically makes the play
a test of its actors' collective technique.
And there's nothing to complain
about on that score. Under the nuanced and meticulously staged direction of Jonathan Kent, the imported British
cast (in the imported British production) are about as impressive as they can
be, gliding from one reality to another with seamless grace and no artifact
tells of the one previous. And the audience I was with sure appreciated the
artistry. There's definitely a hypnotic spell to the proceedings, and it did
take hold. And maybe, especially if you've never seen a Zeller play before,
that's enough.
But if you have been in Zellerland before, you may still, spell and all, find
the soup to be getting thinner, not richer.
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