Gina McKee in The Forest
(Picture: Richard Davenport)Forget Wordle: London’s thorniest puzzle is on the Hampstead stage. The latest play from beady French author Florian Zeller is a conundrum of a thriller involving infidelity and death, in which scenes recur, but with narrative variations or with different characters. It’s quite a coup for this north London theatre to score the world premiere, though it’s not Zeller’s finest work.
Jonathan Kent’s briskly efficient production is decently acted for the most part by a starry cast including Toby Stephens, Gina McKee and Paul McGann. But for all its formal experimentation and mental provocations, the play feels bourgeois and old-fashioned, particularly in its gender politics: men are active participants, women largely stooges.
We first see middle-aged surgeon Pierre (Stephens) and his wife (McKee) dealing with a daughter betrayed by her boyfriend. Then we see a very similar man (McGann) in bed with a younger mistress (Angel Coulby) who wants more of him than he will give. We meet an insipid couple at a tense drinks party, a young man who may be the daughter’s boyfriend or something more sinister, and an intimidating, death-like figure with a skinny black suit, white face and red lips (Finbar Lynch, unnervingly excellent).
The scenarios blend, warp and overlap, spilling out of the different zones in Anna Fleischle’s set of smart Parisian interiors. Pierre’s flat fills with flowers and a generic painting turns into a semi-nude of the mistress. It’s all very intriguing, if ultimately bewildering. The suspicion is that Pierre is losing the plot, committing and atoning for imaginary crimes in the dark forest of his mind. Zeller won’t do anything as vulgar as explain, though, and even throws in a big, symbolic red herring at the end.
Stephens expresses Pierre’s growing anxiety well but doesn’t quite convince in the moments of high emotion: McGann is solid and disconcerting, while the brilliant McKee simply doesn’t have enough to do. The roles of the daughter and of a female friend are chronically underwritten too, and that of the mistress fits a familiar sex-crazed, bunny-boiling template. The two moments where Coulby is required to be briefly topless in the role are hardly balanced by a later flash of Toby Stephens’ haunch.
Zeller previously used shifting realities to suggest dementia and mental instability in his excellent trilogy The Father, The Mother and The Son, which became individual hits in London in deft adaptations by Christopher Hampton. Indeed, the two playwrights jointly won the 2021 Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film of The Father, starring Anthony Hopkins. Here, the words are oddly flat: Hampton’s script sounds like what it is: a translation.
At just 80 minutes the play is taut, tight and stylish enough to command the attention. But I suspect that deep down, the psychological shenanigans that Zeller inserts into hackneyed thriller tropes really aren’t that profound.
