Share This

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The Tricycle Theatre’s production of The Father succeeds in showing what memory loss looks like on stage and bringing the audience into the midst of the experience

“Where’s the chicken? “

“What chicken, dad?”

“The chicken. You had it a minute ago and you went into the kitchen with it, to cook it for our dinner.”

“There’s no chicken, dad. I’ve only just come in from work.”

And so the confusion continues, carrying with it the closely packed audience of The Father as performed in the Tricycle Theatre. The scenes in the play are constantly repeated, but with changes to the faces and characters that the father, played by Kenneth Cranham, witnesses with an increased confusion.

The differences he encounters so vividly, though, are denied by the very same people who are swapping places with each other. Even his daughter, played by Clare Skinner, changes character and is sometimes played by Rebecca Charles. Their husbands, too, oscillate between Pierre (Colin Tierney) and “Man” (Jim Sturgeon).

It’s a tangled mess that the audience is initially left to decipher: is this a Kafka-like conspiracy, or a disparate set of scenes which will somehow come together at the end? But it’s neither, and it never does. Instead, The Father shows us what the world looks like to a man with memory loss. And as this 95-minute play progresses, it delves deeper, portraying the world as it appears to someone with dementia.

The skill in this production is that the audience is increasingly taken alongside Andre on his journey as we try to fathom out what we know has just happened, and what we’re told took place in Andre’s past life. Was he a tap dancer or an engineer? One thing for sure is that he’s witty and opinionated, and as his sense of self rapidly erodes, his anger increasingly becomes our frustration. Despite the blur, the focus of the play never wavers as it’s moved along using the directness of Pinter-esque language. It leaves us with an empathetic rather than sympathetic understanding of Andre’s dilemmas.

An original concept which lends itself beautifully to the intimate studio stage of the Tricycle Theatre, Florian Zeller’s play is set in Paris, but could really be anywhere because its message is universal. Powerfully translated by Christopher Hampton, it conveys in English what must have been equally poignant in French: the bumpy journey into warrens, cul-de-sacs and paths that don’t connect.

His daughter Anne is the one left to pick up the pieces, and she treats her fate with a comic lightness in a highly convincing performance. This said, it’s little wonder that Clare Skinner is so strong in her role, as it overlaps with her popularly acclaimed character in the TV sitcom Outnumbered. There, as in The Father, Skinner’s character is burdened with the demands of difficult family members. In Outnumbered it’s her three sassy children, who won’t take no for an answer. In this production, it’s the trials of dealing with a man for whom time has stood still as he struggles to cope with the present. And, as in the sitcom, she undertakes her part with a world-weary cheerfulness, treading a narrow line between frustration, anger, guilt and sorrow as her father fails to recognise her and the world her current life occupies.

The only possible consolation for Anne must lie in the fact that every word her dad speaks is truthful, so their relationship is one of honesty, though often painful. His superior regard for her deceased sister comes out on several occasions, leaving Anne to feel inadequate: when Anne tells him she’s found a partner whom she wants to move to London to be with for example, her father is astonished that anyone would be interested in the daughter that’s left behind.

The magnetism present in this play is that the audience also feels the tiredness which accompanies dementia in the daily uphill battles, as small but noticeable details in your surroundings change: the actors playing the characters, the things they say and finally the set itself, which gradually transforms from the living room of Andre’s flat to his daughter’s flat to Andre’s room in a care home. Like Andre, you never quite know where you are, nor whether the chicken was cooked or eaten, or even whether it was ever brought into the flat at all. But what could be a descent into gloom and despair actually has a warm glow to it, because for all the sorrow that Andre faces in swimming against the tide, what he once had was worth living for and is still worth clinging on to.

The Father won the 2014 Moliere Award and is playing at the Tricycle Theatre until June 13th.

Photo Credits: The Tricycle Theatre