Reality is a slippery proposition in the plays of French dramatist Florian Zeller. In both The Father and The Mother, the title characters are lost in a maze of conflicting and confusing circumstances. So is the audience since everything is seen via the protagonists’ perceptions which are altered by dementia or mental illness. Zeller’s latest work, The Height of the Storm, translated by Christopher Hampton, is now on Broadway at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, after hit runs in Paris and London. Here the skewed perspective is doubled and perhaps trebled since we seem to be viewing the story through several different lenses. Until the very end of its brief but absorbing running time, we’re not entirely sure whose eyes we are looking through or even if it’s the same point of view, since the perspective shifts several times. The result is a disturbing, unsettling portrait of how we deal with—or don’t deal with—death.
Director Jonathan Kent is a reliable guide on this labyrinthine journey of the mind. An expert cast lead by acting legends Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins provide the necessary signposts to lead us to the heartbreaking conclusion.
In the stylishly appointed kitchen of an isolated country house (Anthony Ward designed the attractive set), eminent writer Andre appears unable to accept the recent demise of his strong-willed wife Madeleine. His two daughters Anne and Elise are down from Paris for the weekend to sort through his papers for publication and to persuade him to move to a retirement community. But then Madeleine walks in, and maybe it’s Andre who has really passed away. And who’s the mysterious woman arriving for tea? Is she a former lover of Andre’s or his best friend’s? Is the silent man standing in the hallway a real estate agent trying to sell the house or Elise’s new boyfriend? All of these scenarios are possible as timelines crisscross and overlap. Kent’s seamless staging, aided immensely by Hugh Vanstone’s mercurial lighting, keeps the flow and balance of Zeller’s poetic, distorted script just right.
Without a masterful ensemble, this Storm would be all thunder and confusion. Fortunately, the cast is rock-solid in its pursuit of objectives and perspectives, though those may change from moment to moment. Pryce captures Andre’s desperate attempt to comprehend the dark new world in which he finds himself. He is like a man cast adrift, clinging to whatever shreds of information he can.
Atkins conveys Madeleine’s steely practicality and iron will as well as her tenderness towards Andre. Amanda Drew as Anne has the challenging task of providing the closest thing to an anchor of reality in hall of illusions. She fulfills her assignment with compassionate. Lisa O’Hare gets across Elise’s conflicted emotions over her parents’ plight while Lucy Cohu and James Hillier lend resonance as the mysterious visitors.
